Reliability of Wikipedia
Encyclopedia
The reliability of Wikipedia
(primarily of the English language version
), compared to other encyclopedia
s and more specialized sources, is assessed in many ways, including statistically
, through comparative review, analysis of the historical patterns, and strengths and weaknesses inherent in the editing process unique to Wikipedia.
Several studies have been done to assess the reliability of Wikipedia. A notable early study in the journal Nature
said that in 2005, Wikipedia scientific articles came close to the level of accuracy in Encyclopædia Britannica
and had a similar rate of "serious errors". The study by Nature was disputed by Encyclopædia Britannica, and later Nature responded to this refutation with both a formal response and a point-by-point rebuttal of Britannicas main objections. Between 2008 and 2010, articles in medical and scientific fields such as pathology
, toxicology
, oncology
and pharmaceuticals comparing Wikipedia to professional and peer-reviewed sources found that Wikipedia's depth and coverage were of a high standard. Concerns regarding readability have been raised. However, omissions sometimes remained an issue, at times due to public relations
removal of adverse product information.
Wikipedia is open to anonymous and collaborative editing
, so assessments of its reliability usually include examinations of how quickly false or misleading information is removed. An early study conducted by IBM
researchers in 2003—two years following Wikipedia's establishment—found that "vandalism is usually repaired extremely quickly — so quickly that most users will never see its effects" and concluded that Wikipedia had "surprisingly effective self-healing capabilities". A 2007 peer-reviewed study stated that "42% of damage is repaired almost immediately... Nonetheless, there are still hundreds of millions of damaged views."
Several incidents have also been publicized in which false information has lasted for a long time in Wikipedia. In May 2005, a user edited the biographical
article on John Seigenthaler Sr. so that it contained several false and defamatory statements. The inaccurate information went unnoticed until September 2005, when they were discovered by a friend of Seigenthaler. After the information was removed from Wikipedia, it remained for another three weeks on sites which mirror Wikipedia content. A biographical article in French Wikipedia portrayed Léon-Robert de L’Astran as an 18th century anti-slavery ship owner, which led Ségolène Royal
, a presidential candidate, to praise him. A student investigation later determined that the article was a hoax and de L’Astran had never existed.
of this kind. It contrasts with many more traditional models of knowledge and publishing
, which attempt to limit content creation to a relatively small group of approved editors in order to exercise strong hierarchical
control. In order to improve reliability, some editors have called for "stable versions" of articles, or articles that have been reviewed by the community and locked from further editing.
Wikipedia allows anonymous editing: contributors are not required to provide any identification, or even an email address. A 2007 study at Dartmouth College
of the English Wikipedia noted that, contrary to usual social expectations, anonymous editors were some of Wikipedia's most productive contributors of valid content. The Dartmouth study was criticized by John Timmer of the Ars Technica
website for its methodological shortcomings.
While Wikipedia has the potential for extremely rapid growth and harnesses an entire community—much in the same way as other communal projects such as Linux
—it goes further in trusting the same community to self-regulate and become more proficient at quality control
. Wikipedia has harnessed the work of millions of people to produce the world's largest knowledge-based site along with software to support it, resulting in more than nineteen million articles written, across more than 280 different language versions, in less than twelve years. For this reason, there has been considerable interest in the project both academically and from diverse fields such as information technology
, business
, project management
, knowledge acquisition, software programming, other collaborative projects
and sociology
, to explore whether the Wikipedia model can produce quality results, what collaboration in this way can reveal about people, and whether the scale of involvement can overcome the obstacles of individual limitations and poor editorship which would otherwise arise.
Another reason for inquiry is a growing and widespread reliance on Wikipedia by both websites and individuals, who use it as a source of information, raising concerns over such a major source being susceptible to rapid change, including the whimsical introduction of misinformation. It is the responsibility of those who intend to use such a dynamically changing, multi-authored source to ascertain the quality and reliability of articles, and the degree of usefulness, misinformation or vandalism
which might be expected, in order to decide what reliance to place upon them. A helpful safeguard is always to reference Wikipedia accurately when it is quoted to allow false or unreliable material to be identified and corrected.
The first four of these have been the subjects of various studies of the project, while the presence of bias is strongly disputed on both sides, and the prevalence and quality of citations can be tested within Wikipedia.
published a story titled "Can you trust Wikipedia?" in which a panel of experts was asked to review seven entries related to their fields, giving each article reviewed a number designation out of ten points. Scores ranged from 0 to 8, but most received marks between 5 and 8. The most common criticisms were:
The most common praises were:
In December 2005, the journal Nature
conducted a single-blind study comparing the accuracy of a sample of articles from Wikipedia and Encyclopædia Britannica
. The sample included 42 articles on scientific topics, including biographies of well-known scientists. The articles were compared for accuracy by academic reviewers who remained anonymous − a customary practice for journal article reviews. Based on their review, the average Wikipedia article contained 4 errors or omissions; the average Britannica article, 3. Only 4 serious errors were found in Wikipedia, and 4 in Encyclopædia Britannica. The study concluded: "Wikipedia comes close to Britannica in terms of the accuracy of its science entries", although Wikipedia's articles were often "poorly structured".
Encyclopædia Britannica expressed concerns, leading Nature to release further documentation of its survey method. Based on this additional information, Encyclopædia Britannica denied the validity of the Nature study, stating that it was "fatally flawed". Among Britannicas criticisms were that excerpts rather than the full texts of some of their articles were used, that some of the extracts were compilations that included articles written for the youth version, that Nature did not check the factual assertions of its reviewers, and that many points which the reviewers labeled as errors were differences of editorial opinion. Nature acknowledged the compiled nature of some of the Britannica extracts, but denied that this invalidated the conclusions of the study. Encyclopædia Britannica also argued that while the Nature study showed that the error rate between the two encyclopedias was similar, a breakdown of the errors indicated that the mistakes in Wikipedia were more often the inclusion of incorrect facts, while the mistakes in Britannica were "errors of omission", making "Britannica far more accurate than Wikipedia, according to the figures". Nature has since rejected the Britannica response, stating that any errors on the part of its reviewers were not biased in favor of either encyclopedia, that in some cases it used excerpts of articles from both encyclopedias, and that Britannica did not share particular concerns with Nature before publishing its "open letter" rebuttal.
In June 2006, Roy Rosenzweig
, a professor specializing in American history, published a comparison of the Wikipedia biographies of 25 Americans to the corresponding biographies found on Encarta and American National Biography Online. He wrote that Wikipedia is "surprisingly accurate in reporting names, dates, and events in U.S. history", with some of the errors being "widely held but inaccurate beliefs". However, he stated that Wikipedia often fails to distinguish important from trivial details, and does not provide the best references. He also complained about Wikipedia's lack of "persuasive analysis and interpretations, and clear and engaging prose."
A web-based survey conducted from December 2005 to May 2006 by Larry Press, a professor of Information Systems at California State University at Dominguez Hills, assessed the "accuracy and completeness of Wikipedia articles". Fifty people (a fairly low response rate) accepted an invitation to assess an article. Of the fifty, thirty-eight (76%) agreed or strongly agreed that the Wikipedia article was accurate, and twenty-three (46%) agreed or strongly agreed that it was complete. Eighteen people compared the article they reviewed to the article on the same topic in the Encyclopædia Britannica
. Opinions on accuracy were almost equal between the two encyclopedias (6 favoring Britannica, 7 favoring Wikipedia, 5 stating they were equal), and eleven (61%) found Wikipedia somewhat or substantially more complete, compared to seven (39%) for Britannica. The survey did not attempt random selection of the participants, and it is not clear how the participants were invited.
The German computing magazine c't
performed a comparison of Brockhaus Multimedial, Microsoft Encarta
, and the German Wikipedia
in October 2004: Experts evaluated 66 articles in various fields. In overall score, Wikipedia was rated 3.6 out of 5 points (B-). A second test by c't in February 2007 used 150 search terms, of which 56 were closely evaluated, to compare four digital encyclopedias: Bertelsmann
Enzyklopädie 2007, Brockhaus Multimedial premium 2007, Encarta 2007 Enzyklopädie and Wikipedia. It concluded: "We did not find more errors in the texts of the free encyclopedia than in those of its commercial competitors."
Viewing Wikipedia as fitting the economists' definition of a perfectly competitive marketplace of ideas, George Bragues (University of Guelph-Humber
), examined Wikipedia's articles on seven top Western philosophers: Aristotle
, Plato
, Immanuel Kant
, René Descartes
, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
, Thomas Aquinas
, and John Locke
. Wikipedia's articles were compared to a consensus list of themes culled from four reference works in philosophy. Bragues found that, on average, Wikipedia's articles only covered 52% of consensus themes. No errors were found, though there were significant omissions.
PC Pro
magazine (August 2007) asked experts to compare four articles (a small sample
) in their scientific fields between Wikipedia, Britannica and Encarta. In each case Wikipedia was described as "largely sound", "well handled", "performs well", "good for the bare facts" and "broadly accurate." One article had "a marked deterioration towards the end" while another had "clearer and more elegant" writing, a third was assessed as less well written but better detailed than its competitors, and a fourth was "of more benefit to the serious student than its Encarta or Britannica equivalents." No serious errors were noted in Wikipedia articles, whereas serious errors were noted in one Encarta and one Britannica article.
In October 2007, Australian magazine PC Authority published a feature article on the accuracy of Wikipedia. The article compared Wikipedia's content to other popular online encyclopedias, namely Britannica and Encarta
. The magazine asked experts to evaluate articles pertaining to their field. Wikipedia was comparable to the other encyclopedias, topping the chemistry category.
In December 2007, German magazine Stern
published the results of a comparison between the German Wikipedia and the online version of the 15-volume edition of Brockhaus Enzyklopädie
. The test was commissioned to a research institute (Cologne-based WIND GmbH), whose analysts assessed 50 articles from each encyclopedia (covering politics, business, sports, science, culture, entertainment, geography, medicine, history and religion) on four criteria (accuracy, completeness, timeliness and clarity), and judged Wikipedia articles to be more accurate on the average (1.6 on a scale from 1 to 6, versus 2.3 for Brockhaus with 1 as the best and 6 as the worst). Wikipedia's coverage was also found to be more complete and up to date; however, Brockhaus was judged to be more clearly written, while several Wikipedia articles were criticized as being too complicated for non-experts, and many as too lengthy.
In its April 2008 issue British computing magazine PC Plus
compared the English Wikipedia with the DVD editions of World Book Encyclopedia and Encyclopædia Britannica, assessing for each the coverage of a series of random subjects. It concluded The quality of content is good in all three cases and advised Wikipedia users Be aware that erroneous edits do occur, and check anything that seems outlandish with a second source. But the vast majority of Wikipedia is filled with valuable and accurate information.
, self-described information specialist and Internet consultant Philip Bradley said that he would not use Wikipedia and was "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 are reliable, as their livelihood depends on it. But with something like this, all that goes out the window."
A 2006 review of Wikipedia by Library Journal
, using a panel of librarians, "the toughest critics of reference materials, whatever their format", asked "long standing reviewers" to evaluate three areas of Wikipedia (popular culture, current affairs, and science), and concluded: "While there are still reasons to proceed with caution when using a resource that takes pride in limited professional management, many encouraging signs suggest that (at least for now) Wikipedia may be granted the librarian's seal of approval". A reviewer who "decided to explore controversial historical and current events, hoping to find glaring abuses" concluded "I was pleased by Wikipedia's objective presentation of controversial subjects" but that "as with much information floating around in cyberspace, a healthy degree of skepticism and skill at winnowing fact from opinion are required." Other reviewers noted that there is "much variation" but "good content abounds."
In 2007, Michael Gorman
, former president of the American Library Association (ALA) stated in an Encyclopædia Britannica
blog that "A professor who encourages the use of Wikipedia is the intellectual equivalent of a dietician who recommends a steady diet of Big Macs with everything."
The library at Trent University
in Ontario
states of Wikipedia that many articles are "long and comprehensive", but that there is "a lot of room for misinformation and bias [and] a lot of variability in both the quality and depth of articles." It adds that Wikipedia has advantages and limitations, that it has "excellent coverage of technical topics" and articles are "often added quickly and, as a result, coverage of current events is quite good", comparing this to traditional sources which are unable to achieve this task. It concludes that depending upon the need, one should think critically and assess the appropriateness of one's sources, "whether you are looking for fact or opinion, how in-depth you want to be as you explore a topic, the importance of reliability and accuracy, and the importance of timely or recent information", and adds that Wikipedia can be used in any event as a "starting point."
An article for the Canadian Library Association
(CLA) discusses the Wikipedia approach, process and outcome in depth, commenting for example that in controversial topics, "what is most remarkable is that the two sides actually engaged each other and negotiated a version of the article that both can more or less live with." The author comments that:
Information Today (March 2006) cites librarian Nancy O’Neill (principal librarian for Reference Services at the Santa Monica Public Library System) as saying that "there is a good deal of skepticism about Wikipedia in the library community" but that "she also admits cheerfully that Wikipedia makes a good starting place for a search. You get terminology, names, and a feel for the subject."
PC Pro (August 2007) cites the head of the European and American Collection at the British Library
, Stephen Bury, as stating "Wikipedia is potentially a good thing – it provides a speedier response to new events, and to new evidence on old items." The article concludes: "For [Bury], the problem isn't so much the reliability of Wikipedia's content so much as the way in which it's used. "It's already become the first port of call for the researcher", Bury says, before noting that this is "not necessarily problematic except when they go no further." According to Bury, the trick to using Wikipedia is to understand that "just because it's in an encyclopedia (free, web or printed) doesn't mean it's true. Ask for evidence .. and contribute."
s are not impressed when students cite print-based encyclopedias in assigned work.
An empirical study conducted in 2006 by a Nottingham University Business School lecturer in Information Systems, the subject of a review on the technical website Ars Technica
, involving 55 academics asked to review specific Wikipedia articles that either were in their expert field (group 1) or chosen at random (group 2), concluded that "The experts found Wikipedia's articles to be more credible than the non–experts. This suggests that the accuracy of Wikipedia is high. However, the results should not be seen as support for Wikipedia as a totally reliable resource as, according to the experts, 13 percent of the articles contain mistakes (10% of the experts reported factual errors of an unspecified degree, 3% of them reported spelling errors)."
The Gould Library at Carleton College
in Minnesota
has a web-page describing the use of Wikipedia in academia. It asserts that "Wikipedia is without question a valuable and informative resource", but that "there is an inherent lack of reliability and stability" to its articles, again drawing attention to similar advantages and limitations as other sources. As with other reviews it comments that one should assess one's sources and what is desired from them, and that "Wikipedia may be an appropriate resource for some assignments, but not for others." It cited Jimmy Wales' view that Wikipedia may not be ideal as a source for all academic uses, and (as with other sources) suggests that at the least, one strength of Wikipedia is that it provides a good starting point for current information on a very wide range of topics.
In 2007, the Chronicle of Higher Education published an article written by Cathy Davidson
, Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies and English at Duke University
, in which she asserts that Wikipedia should be used to teach students about the concepts of reliability and credibility.
In 2008, Hamlet Isakhanli
, founder and president of Khazar University
, compared the Encyclopædia Britannica and English Wikipedia articles on Azerbaijan
and related subjects. His study found that Wikipedia covered the subject much more widely, more accurately and in more detail, though with some lack of balance, and that Wikipedia was the best source for the first approximation.
Steve Jones, a professor of communication at the University of Illinois at Chicago, said that the number of Wikipedia articles is so large that it "seems impossible that they could police it in an effective way".
Geoffrey Nunberg
, an adjunct full professor at UC Berkeley's School of Information, has criticized Wikipedia for relying too much on citing sources even though the said sources may not be more accurate than Wikipedia itself.
Some academic journals do refer to Wikipedia articles, but are not elevating it to the same level as traditional references. For instance, 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", and dozens of enhanced perspectives have provided such links since then. The publisher of Science states that these enhanced perspectives "include hypernotes – which link directly to websites of other relevant information available online – beyond the standard bibliographic references".
is the norm. While some of Wikipedia's content has passed a form of peer review, most has not.
A 2008 study examined 80 Wikipedia drug entries. The researchers found few factual errors in this set of articles, but determined that these articles were often missing important information, like contraindications and drug interactions. One of the researchers noted that "If people went and used this as a sole or authoritative source without contacting a health professional...those are the types of negative impacts that can occur." The researchers also compared Wikipedia to Medscape Drug Reference (MDR), by looking for answers to 80 different questions covering eight categories of drug information, including adverse drug events, dosages, and mechanism of action. They have determined that MDR provided answers to 82.5 percent of the questions, while Wikipedia could only answer 40 percent, and that answers were less likely to be complete for Wikipedia as well. None of the answers from Wikipedia were determined factually inaccurate, while they found four inaccurate answers in MDR. But the researchers found 48 errors of omission in the Wikipedia entries, compared to 14 for MDR. The lead investigator concluded: "I think that these errors of omission can be just as dangerous [as inaccuracies]", and he pointed out that drug company representatives have been caught deleting information from Wikipedia entries that make their drugs look unsafe.
A 2009 survey asked US toxicologists how accurately they rated the portrayal of health risks of chemicals in different media sources. It was based on the answers of 937 members of the Society of Toxicology
and found that these experts regarded Wikipedia's reliability in this area as far higher than that of all traditional news media:
In 2010 researchers compared 10 types of cancer to data from the National Cancer Institute
's Physician Data Query and concluded "the Wiki resource had similar accuracy and depth to the professionally edited database" and that "sub-analysis comparing common to uncommon cancers demonstrated no difference between the two", but that ease of readability was an issue.
A study in 2011 came to the result that categories most frequently absent in Wikipedia's drug articles are those of drug interactions and medication use in breastfeeding. Other categories with incomplete coverage were descriptions of off-label indications, contraindications and precautions, adverse drug events and dosing. Information most frequently deviating from other sources used in the study were that of contraindications and precautions, drug absorption and adverse drug events.
, a former editor-in-chief of Encyclopædia Britannica
, stated that Wikipedia errs in billing itself as an encyclopedia, because that word implies a level of authority and accountability that he believes cannot be possessed by an openly editable reference. McHenry argued that "the typical user doesn't know how conventional encyclopedias achieve reliability, only that they do." He added:
Similarly, Britannica' s executive editor, Ted Pappas, was quoted in The Guardian
as saying:
In the September 12, 2006 edition of The Wall Street Journal
, Jimmy Wales
debated with Dale Hoiberg
, editor-in-chief of Encyclopædia Britannica
. Hoiberg focused on a need for expertise and control in an encyclopedia and cited Lewis Mumford
that overwhelming information could "bring about a state of intellectual enervation and depletion hardly to be distinguished from massive ignorance."
Wales emphasized Wikipedia's differences, and asserted that openness and transparency lead to quality. Hoiberg claimed that he "had neither the time nor space to respond to [criticisms]" and "could corral any number of links to articles alleging errors in Wikipedia", to which Wales responded: "No problem! Wikipedia to the rescue with a fine article", and included a link to the Wikipedia article Criticism of Wikipedia.
":
BBC
technology
specialist Bill Thompson
wrote that "Most Wikipedia entries are written and submitted in good faith, and we should not let the contentious areas such as politics, religion or biography shape our view of the project as a whole", that it forms a good starting point for serious research but that:
Thompson adds the observation that since most popular online sources are inherently unreliable in this way, one byproduct of the information age
is a wiser audience who are learning to check information rather than take it on faith due to its source, leading to "a better sense of how to evaluate information sources."
The Supreme Court of India in its judgment in Commr. of Customs, Bangalore vs. ACER India Pvt. (Citation 2007(12)SCALE581) has held that "We have referred to Wikipedia, as the learned Counsel for the parties relied thereupon. It is an online encyclopaedia and information can be entered therein by any person and as such it may not be authentic."
In his 2007 Guide to Military History on the Internet, Simon Fowler
rated Wikipedia as "the best general resource" for military history research, and stated that "the results are largely accurate and generally free of bias." When rating WP as the No. 1 military site he mentioned that "Wikipedia is often criticised for its inaccuracy and bias, but in my experience the military history articles are spot on."
In July 2008, The Economist
magazine described Wikipedia as "a user-generated reference service" and noted that Wikipedia's "elaborate moderation rules put a limit to acrimony" generated by cyber-nationalism.
Andrew Orlowski
, a columnist for The Register
, expressed similar criticisms, writing that the use of the term "encyclopedia" to describe Wikipedia may lead users into believing it is more reliable than it may be.
Jimmy Wales
, the de facto
leader of Wikipedia, stresses that encyclopedias of any type are not usually appropriate as primary sources, and should not be relied upon as being authoritative.
article, where false information added in Wikipedia was apparently used by two newspapers, leading to it being treated as reliable in Wikipedia. This process of creating reliable sources for false facts has been termed "Citogenesis" by webcomic artist Randall Munroe
.
They also stated that "it is essentially impossible to find a crisp definition of vandalism".
Lih (2004) compared articles before and after they were mentioned in the press, and found that externally referenced articles are of higher quality work.
An informal assessment by the popular IT magazine PC Pro for its 2007 article "Wikipedia Uncovered" tested Wikipedia by introducing 10 errors that "varied between bleeding obvious and deftly subtle" into articles (the researchers later corrected the articles they had edited). Labeling the results "impressive" it noted that all but one was noted and fixed within the hour, and that "the Wikipedians' tools and know-how were just too much for our team." A second series of another 10 tests, using "far more subtle errors" and additional techniques to conceal their nature, met similar results: "despite our stealth attempts the vast majority... were discovered remarkably quickly... the ridiculously minor Jesse James error was corrected within a minute and a very slight change to Queen Anne's entry was put right within two minutes." Two of the latter series were not detected. The article concluded that "Wikipedia corrects the vast majority of errors within minutes, but if they're not spotted within the first day the chances... dwindle as you're then relying on someone to spot the errors while reading the article rather than reviewing the edits."
A study in late-2007 systematically inserted inaccuracies into Wikipedia entries about the lives of philosophers. Depending on how exactly the data are interpreted, either one third or one half of the inaccuracies were corrected within 48 hours.
A 2007 peer-reviewed study that measured the actual number of page views with "damaged" content, concluded:
of the California Institute of Technology, was released to match anonymous IP edits in the encyclopedia with an extensive database of addresses. News stories appeared about IP addresses from various organizations such as the Central Intelligence Agency
, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee
, Diebold, Inc.
and the Australian government
being used to make edits to Wikipedia articles, sometimes of an opinionated or questionable nature. The BBC
quoted a Wikimedia spokesperson as praising the tool: "We really value transparency and the scanner really takes this to another level. Wikipedia Scanner may prevent an organization or individuals from editing articles that they're really not supposed to."
The WikiScanner story was also covered by The Independent
, which stated that many "censorial interventions" by editors with vested interests on a variety of articles in Wikipedia had been discovered:
Not everyone hailed WikiScanner as a success for Wikipedia. Oliver Kamm
, in a column for The Times
, argued instead that:
WikiScanner only reveals conflicts of interest when the editor does not have a Wikipedia account and their IP address is used instead. Conflict of interest editing done by editors with accounts is not detected, since those edits are anonymous to everyone – except for a handful of privileged Wikipedia admins.
, which is to say its general nature leads, without necessarily any conscious intention, to the propagation of various prejudices. Although many articles in newspapers have concentrated on minor, indeed trivial, factual errors in Wikipedia articles, there are also concerns about large scale, presumably unintentional effects from the increasing influence and use of Wikipedia as a research tool at all levels. In an article in the Times Higher Education magazine (London) philosopher Martin Cohen frames Wikipedia of having "become a monopoly" with "all the prejudices and ignorance of its creators", which he describes as a "youthful cab-drivers" perspective. Cohen's argument, however, finds a grave conclusion in these circumstances: "To control the reference sources that people use is to control the way people comprehend the world. Wikipedia may have a benign, even trivial face, but underneath may lie a more sinister and subtle threat to freedom of thought." That freedom is undermined by what he sees as what matters on Wikipedia, "not your sources but the 'support of the community'."
Critics also point to the tendency to cover topics in a detail disproportionate to their importance. For example, Stephen Colbert
once mockingly praised Wikipedia for having a "longer entry on 'lightsaber
s' than it does on the 'printing press
'." In an interview with The Guardian, Dale Hoiberg, the editor-in-chief of Encyclopædia Britannica
, noted:
This critical approach has been satirised as "Wikigroaning", a term coined by Jon Hendren of the website Something Awful
. In the game, two articles (preferably with similar names) are compared: one about an acknowledged serious or classical subject and the other about a topic popular or current. Defenders of a broad inclusion criteria have held that the encyclopedia's coverage of pop culture does not impose space constraints on the coverage of more serious subjects (see "Wiki is not paper"). As Ivor Tossell noted:
Wikipedia has been accused of deficiencies in comprehensiveness because of its voluntary nature, and of reflecting the systemic biases of its contributors. 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." In a GamesRadar
editorial, columnist Charlie Barrat juxtaposed Wikipedia's coverage of video game-related topics with its smaller content about topics that have greater real-world significance, such as God, World War II and former U.S. presidents.
Wikipedia has been praised for making it possible for articles to be updated or created in response to current events. For example, the then-new article on the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake
in its English edition was cited often by the press shortly after the incident. Its editors have also argued that, as a website, Wikipedia is able to include articles on a greater number of subjects than print encyclopedias may.
Wikipedia's notability
guidelines, and the application thereof, are the subject of much criticism. Nicholson Baker
considers the notability standards arbitrary and essentially unsolvable:
Criticizing the "deletionists", Nicholson Baker then writes:
Yet another criticism about the deletionists is this: "The increasing difficulty of making a successful edit; the exclusion of casual users; slower growth – all are hallmarks of the deletionists approach."
Complaining that his own biography was on the verge of deletion for lack of notability, Timothy Noah
argued that:
In the same article, Noah mentions that the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Stacy Schiff
was not considered notable enough for a Wikipedia entry before she wrote an extensive New Yorker
article on Wikipedia itself.
Another criticism is that a politically liberal bias is predominant. According to Jimmy Wales
: "The Wikipedia community is very diverse, from liberal
to conservative
to libertarian
and beyond. If averages mattered, and due to the nature of the wiki software (no voting) they almost certainly don't, I would say that the Wikipedia community is slightly more liberal than the U.S. population on average, because we are global and the international community of English speakers is slightly more liberal than the U.S. population. There are no data or surveys to back that." Andrew Schlafly created Conservapedia
because of his perception that Wikipedia contained a liberal bias. Conservapedia's editors have compiled a list of alleged examples of liberal bias in Wikipedia. In 2007, an article in The Christian Post
criticised Wikipedia's coverage of intelligent design
, saying that it was biased and hypocritical. Lawrence Solomon
of the National Review
stated that Wikipedia articles on subjects like global warming
, intelligent design, and Roe v. Wade
are slanted in favor of liberal views.
In a September 2010 issue of the conservative weekly Human Events
, Rowan Scarborough
presented a critique of Wikipedia's coverage of American politicians prominent in the approaching midterm elections as evidence of systemic liberal bias. Scarborough compares the biographical articles of liberal and conservative opponents in Senate races in the Alaska Republican primary and the Delaware and Nevada general election, emphasizing the quantity of negative coverage of tea party
-endorsed candidates. He also cites some criticism by Lawrence Solomon and quotes in full the lead section of Wikipedia's article on the competing Conservapedia
as evidence of an underlying bias.
Tim Anderson, a senior lecturer in political economy
at the University of Sydney
, said that Wikipedia administrators display a U.S.-oriented bias in their interaction with editors, and in their determination of sources that are appropriate for use on the site. Anderson was outraged after several of the sources he used in his edits to Hugo Chávez
, including Venezuela Analysis and Z Magazine, were disallowed as "unusable". Anderson also described Wikipedia's neutral point of view policy to ZDNet Australia as "a facade", and that Wikipedia "hides behind a reliance on corporate media editorials".
Justine Cassell
, a professor and the director of the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, has criticized Wikipedia for lacking not only women contributors but also extensive and in-depth encyclopedic attention to many topics regarding gender. An article in The New York Times cites a Wikimedia Foundation study which found that fewer than 13% of contributors to Wikipedia are women. Sue Gardner
, the executive director of the foundation, said increasing diversity was about making the encyclopedia "as good as it could be." Factors the article cited as possibly discouraging women from editing included the "obsessive fact-loving realm," associations with the "hard-driving hacker crowd," and the necessity to be "open to very difficult, high-conflict people, even misogynists."
racing decision, the UK Intellectual Property Office considered both the reliability of Wikipedia, and its usefulness as a reliable source of evidence:
In the United States, the United States Court of Federal Claims
has ruled that "Wikipedia may not be a reliable source of information." and "...Articles [from Wikipedia] do not - at least on their face - remotely meet this reliability requirement...A review of the Wikipedia website reveals a pervasive and, for our purposes, disturbing series of disclaimers..."
Wikipedia has also developed into a key source for some current new events such as the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake
and related tsunami
, and the 2007 Virginia Tech massacre
. In the latter case, it cites the New York Times, noting with 750,000 page views of the article in the two days after the event:
The Washington Post commented similarly, in the context of 2008 Presidential election candidate biographies, that despite occasional brief vandalism, "it's hard to find a more up-to-date, detailed, thorough article on Obama
than Wikipedia's. As of Friday (14 September 2007), Obama's article – more than 22 pages long, with 15 sections covering his personal and professional life – had a reference list of 167 sources."
Others taking this view include Danah Boyd
, who in 2005 discussed Wikipedia as an academic source, concluding that "[i]t will never be an encyclopedia, but it will contain extensive knowledge that is quite valuable for different purposes", and Bill Thompson
who stated "I use the Wikipedia a lot. It is a good starting point for serious research, but I would never accept something that I read there without checking."
Information Today's March 2006 article concludes on a similar theme:
Dan Gillmor
, a Silicon Valley
commentator and author commented in October 2004 that, "I don't think anyone is saying Wikipedia is an absolute replacement for a traditional encyclopedia. But in the topics I know something about, I've found Wikipedia to be as accurate as any other source I've found."
Referencing Linus' Law of open-source development, Larry Sanger who is a co-founder of Wikipedia, stated on Kuro5hin
in 2001 that "Given enough eyeballs, all errors are shallow."
Sheizaf Rafaeli
and Yaron Ariel report how "most people agree that at least the English version of Wikipedia is approaching critical mass where substantial content disasters should become rare."
Likewise, technology figure Joi Ito
wrote on Wikipedia's authority, "[a]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."
Loc Vu-Quoc, professor for Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the University of Florida
, has stated that "sometimes errors may go for years without being corrected as experts don't usually read Wikipedia articles in their own field to correct these errors".
In a letter to the editor of Physics Today
, Gregg Jaeger, an associate professor at Boston University
, has characterized Wikipedia as a medium that is susceptible to fostering "anarchy and distortions" in relation to scientific information. The letter was in response to a review of his book Quantum Information: An Overview, that had questioned "whether there is an audience for such encyclopedic texts, especially given the easy access to online sources of information such as the arXiv
e-print server and Wikipedia."
People known to use or recommend Wikipedia as a reference source include film critic Roger Ebert
, comedian Rosie O'Donnell
, University of Maryland
physicist
Robert L. Park
and Rutgers University
sociology professor Ted Goertzel.
from Germany, which was inspired by the WikiBu
from Switzerland, shows an evaluation up to five-stars for every English or German article in Wikipedia. Part of this rating is the Californian tool WikiTrust
which shows the trustworthiness of single text parts of Wikipedia articles by white (trustworthy) or orange (not trustworthy) markings.
The Seigenthaler incident demonstrated that the subject of a biographical article must sometimes fix blatant lies about his own life. In May 2005, a user edited the biographical
article on John Seigenthaler Sr. so that it contained several false and defamatory statements. The inaccurate claims went unnoticed between May and September 2005 when they were discovered by Victor S. Johnson, Jr.
, a friend of Seigenthaler. Wikipedia content is often mirrored at sites such as Answers.com
, which means that incorrect information can be replicated alongside correct information through a number of web sources. Such information can develop a misleading air of authority because of its presence at such sites:
Seth Finkelstein reported in an article in The Guardian
on his efforts to remove his own biography page from Wikipedia, simply because it was subjected to defamation:
In the same article Finkelstein recounts how he voted his own biography as "not notable
enough" in order to have it removed from Wikipedia. He goes on to recount a similar story involving Angela Beesley, previously a prominent member of the foundation which runs Wikipedia.
In November 2005, the biography of Jens Stoltenberg
, the Norwegian Prime Minister, was edited to contain libelous statements including accusations of pedophilia and prison time.
Taner Akcam
, a Turkish
history professor at the University of Minnesota
, was detained at the Montreal airport, as his article was vandalized by Turkish nationalists in 2007. While this mistake was resolved, he was again arrested in USA for the same suspicion two days later.
In another example, on March 2, 2007, msnbc.com reported that Hillary Rodham Clinton
had been incorrectly listed for 20 months in her Wikipedia biography as valedictorian
of her class of 1969 at Wellesley College. (Hillary Rodham was not the valedictorian, though she did speak at commencement
.) The article included a link to the Wikipedia edit, where the incorrect information was added on July 9, 2005. After the msnbc.com report, the inaccurate information was removed the same day. Between the two edits, the wrong information had stayed in the Clinton article while it was edited more than 4,800 times over 20 months.
Attempts to perpetrate hoax
es may not be confined to editing Wikipedia articles. In October 2005 Alan Mcilwraith
, a former call centre
worker from Scotland
created a Wikipedia article in which he claimed to be a highly decorated war hero. The article was quickly identified by other users as unreliable (see Wikipedia Signpost article 17 April 2006). However, Mcilwraith had also succeeded in convincing a number of charities and media organizations that he was who he claimed to be:
In May 2010, French politician Ségolène Royal
publicly praised the memory of Léon-Robert de l'Astran, an 18th century naturalist
, humanist
and son of a slave trader, who had opposed the slave trade. The newspaper Sud-Ouest
revealed a month later that de l'Astran had never existed—except as the subject of an article in the French Wikipedia
. Historian Jean-Louis Mahé discovered that de l'Astran was fictional after a student, interested by Royal's praise of him, asked Mahé about him. Mahé's research led him to realise that de l'Astran did not exist in any archives, and he traced the hoax back to the Rotary Club of La Rochelle
. The article, created by members of the Club in January 2007, had thus remained online for three years—unsourced—before the hoax was uncovered. Upon Sud-Ouest’s revelation—repeated in other major French newspapers—French Wikipedia administrator DonCamillo immediately deleted the article.
There have also been instances of users deliberately inserting false information into Wikipedia in order to test the system and demonstrate its alleged unreliability. For example, Gene Weingarten
, a journalist, ran such a test in 2007 by anonymously inserting false information into his own biography. The fabrications were removed 27 hours later by a Wikipedia editor who was regularly watching changes to that article. Television personality Stephen Colbert
lampooned this drawback of Wikipedia, calling it wikiality.
"Death by Wikipedia" is a phenomenon in which a person is erroneously proclaimed dead through vandalism. Articles about the comedian Paul Reiser
, British television host Vernon Kay
, and the West Virginia Senator Robert Byrd
, who died on June 28, 2010, have been vandalized in this way.
Wikipedia considers vandalism as "any addition, removal, or change of content in a deliberate attempt to compromise the integrity of Wikipedia". The Wikipedia page "Researching with Wikipedia" states:
because of an unverified piece of information he added to the Chris Benoit
English Wikipedia
article. This information regarding Benoit's wife's death was added fourteen hours before police discovered the bodies of Benoit and his family. Police detectives seized computer equipment from the man held responsible for the postings, but believed he was uninvolved and did not press charges.
The IP address
from which the edit was made was traced to earlier instances of Wikipedia vandalism. The contributor apologized on Wikinews
, saying:
On 29 August 2008, shortly after the UEFA cup first round draw was completed, an edit was made to AC Omonia
's article, apparently by users of B3ta
, which added the following erroneous information to the section titled "The fans".
On 18 September 2008, David Anderson, a British journalist writing for the Daily Mirror, quoted this in his match preview ahead of Omonia's game with Manchester City
, which appeared in the web and print versions of the Mirror and the nickname was quoted in subsequent editions on 19 September.
In a 2009 incident, University College Dublin
sociology student Shane Fitzgerald added an incorrect quote to the article on the recently deceased composer Maurice Jarre
. Fitzgerald wanted to demonstrate the potential dangers of news reporters' reliance on the internet for information. Although Fitzgerald's edits were removed three times from Wikipedia article for lack of sourcing, they were nevertheless copied into obituary columns in newspapers worldwide. Fitzgerald believes that if he had not come forward his quote would have remained in history as actual fact.
The death of Norman Wisdom
in October 2010 led several major newspapers to repeat the false claim, drawn from Wikipedia, that he was the author of the lyrics of the Second World War song "(There'll Be Bluebirds Over) The White Cliffs of Dover
".
After the 2010 FIFA World Cup
, FIFA president Sepp Blatter
was presented with the Order of the Companions of Oliver Reginald Tambo. The citation, however, read: "The Order of the Companions of OR Tambo in Gold – awarded to Joseph Sepp Bellend Blatter (1936 – ) for his exceptional contribution to the field of football and support for the hosting of the Fifa World Cup on the African continent," after the name on his Wikipedia entry was vandalised.
on articles. In January 2006 it was revealed that several staffers of members of the U.S. House of Representatives had embarked on a campaign to cleanse their respective bosses' biographies on Wikipedia, as well as inserting negative remarks on political opponents. References to a campaign promise by Martin Meehan
to surrender his seat in 2000 were deleted, and negative comments were inserted into the articles on U.S. Senator Bill Frist
and Eric Cantor
, a congressman from Virginia
. Numerous other changes were made from an IP address
which is assigned to the House of Representatives. In an interview, Jimmy Wales
remarked that the changes were "not cool."
On August 31, 2008, The New York Times ran an article detailing the edits made to the biography of Sarah Palin
in the wake of her nomination as running mate of John McCain
. During the 24 hours before the McCain campaign announcement, 30 edits, many of them flattering details, were made to the article by Wikipedia single-purpose user identity Young Trigg. This person later acknowledged working on the McCain campaign, and having several Wikipedia user accounts.
Larry Delay and Pablo Bachelet write that from their perspective, some articles dealing with Latin American history and groups (such as the Sandinistas
and Cuba
) lack political neutrality and are written from a sympathetic Marxist perspective which treats socialist dictatorships favorably at the expense of alternate positions.
In November 2007, libelous accusations were made against two politicians from southwestern France, Jean-Pierre Grand
and Hélène Mandroux-Colas
, on their Wikipedia biographies. Jean-Pierre Grand asked the president of the French National Assembly
and the Prime Minister of France
to reinforce the legislation on the penal responsibility of Internet sites and of authors who peddle false informations in order to cause harm. Senator Jean Louis Masson
then requested the Minister of Justice to tell him whether it would be possible to increase the criminal responsibilities of hosting providers, site operators, and authors of libelous content; the minister declined to do so, recalling the existing rules in the LCEN law.
In 2009, Wikipedia banned the Church of Scientology
from editing any articles on its site. The Wikipedia articles concerning Scientology were edited by members of the group to improve its portrayal.
On August 25, 2010, the Toronto Star
reported that the Canadian "government is now conducting two investigations into federal employees who have taken to Wikipedia to express their opinion on federal policies and bitter political debates."
In 2010, Al Jazeera
's Teymoor Nabili suggested that the article Cyrus Cylinder
had been edited for political purposes by "an apparent tussle of opinions in the shadowy world of hard drives and 'independent' editors that comprise the Wikipedia industry." He suggested that after the Iranian presidential election, 2009
and the ensuing "anti-Iranian activities" a "strenuous attempt to portray the cylinder as nothing more than the propaganda tool of an aggressive invader" was visible. The edits following his analysis of the edits during 2009 and 2010, represented "a complete dismissal of the suggestion that the cylinder, or Cyrus' actions, represent concern for human rights or any kind of enlightened intent," in stark contrast to Cyrus
' own reputation as documented in the Old Testament
and the people of Babylon.
In April 2008, the Boston-based Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA
) organized an e-mail campaign to encourage readers to correct perceived Israel-related biases and inconsistencies in Wikipedia. Excerpts of some of the e-mails were published in the July 2008 issue of Harper's Magazine
under the title of "Candid camera".
CAMERA argued the excerpts were unrepresentative and that it had explicitly campaigned merely "toward encouraging people to learn about and edit the online encyclopedia for accuracy". According to some defenders of CAMERA, serious misrepresentations of CAMERA's role emanated from the competing Electronic Intifada group; moreover, it is said, some other Palestinian advocacy groups have been guilty of systematic misrepresentations and manipulative behaviors but have not suffered bans of editors amongst their staff or volunteers.
Five editors involved in the campaign were sanctioned by Wikipedia administrators. Israeli diplomat David Saranga said that Wikipedia is generally fair in regard to Israel. When confronted with the fact that the entry on Israel mentioned the word "occupation" nine times, whereas the entry on the Palestinian People mentioned "terror" only once, he replied
Political commentator Haviv Rettig Gur, reviewing widespread perceptions in Israel of systemic bias in Wikipedia articles, has argued that there are deeper structural problems creating this bias: anonymous editing favors biased results, especially if those Gur calls "pro-Palestinian activists" organize concerted campaigns as has been done in articles dealing with Arab-Israeli issues, and current Wikipedia policies, while well-meant, have proven ineffective in handling this.
On 3 August 2010, it was reported that the Yesha Council together with Israel Sheli (My Israel), a network of online pro-Israel activists committed to spreading Zionism online, were organizing people at a workshop in Jerusalem to teach them how to edit Wikipedia
articles in a pro-Israeli way. Around 50 people took part in the course.
The project organiser, Ayelet Shaked was interviewed on Arutz Sheva Radio
. She emphasized that the information has to be reliable and meet Wikipedia rules. She cited some examples such as the use of the term “occupation” in Wikipedia entries, as well as in the editing of entries that link Israel with Judea and Samaria
and Jewish history
"
"We don't want to change Wikipedia or turn it into a propaganda arm," commented Naftali Bennett
, director of the Yesha Council. "We just want to show the other side. People think that Israelis are mean, evil people who only want to hurt Arabs all day." "The idea is not to make Wikipedia rightist but for it to include our point of view," he said in another interview.
A course participant explained that the course is not a “Zionist conspiracy to take over Wikipedia"; rather, it is an attempt to balance information about disputed issues presented in the online encyclopedia.
Following the course announcement, Abdul Nasser An-Najar, the head of Palestinian Journalists Syndicate said there were plans to set up a counter group to ensure the Palestinian view is presented online as the "next regional war will be [a] media war."
In 2011, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales
stated in retrospect about the course organized by Israel Sheli, “we saw absolutely no impact from that effort whatsoever. I don't think it ever – it was in the press but we never saw any impact.”
and IDG
News Service that Microsoft
had offered him compensation in exchange for his future editorial services on OOXML. A Microsoft spokesperson, quoted by CBS, commented that "Microsoft and the writer, Rick Jelliffe, had not determined a price and no money had changed hands, but they had agreed that the company would not be allowed to review his writing before submission". CBS also quoted Jimmy Wales
as having expressed his disapproval of Microsoft's involvement: "We were very disappointed to hear that Microsoft was taking that approach."
In a story covered by the BBC
, Jeffrey Merkey claimed that in exchange for a donation his Wikipedia entry was edited in his favor. Jay Walsh, a spokesman for Wikipedia, flatly denied the allegations in an interview given to the Daily Telegraph.
In a story covered by InformationWeek
, Eric Goldman, assistant law
professor at Santa Clara University
in California
argued that "eventually, marketers will build scripts to edit Wikipedia pages to insert links and conduct automated attacks on Wikipedia", thus putting the encyclopedia beyond the ability of its editors to provide countermeasure
s against the attackers, particularly because of a vicious circle
where the strain of responding to these attacks drives core contributors away, increasing the strain on those who remain.
However, Wikipedia operates bots to aid in the detection and removal of vandalism, and uses nofollow and a CAPTCHA
to discourage and filter additions of external links.
In February 2008, British technology news and opinion website The Register
stated that a prominent administrator of Wikipedia had edited a topic area where he had a conflict of interest to keep criticism to a bare minimum, as well as altering the Wikipedia policies regarding personal biography and conflict of interest to favour his editing.
Some of the most scathing criticism of Wikipedia's claimed neutrality came in The Register, which in turn was allegedly criticized by founding members of the project. According to The Register:
Charles Arthur in The Guardian said that "Wikipedia, and so many other online activities, show all the outward characteristics of a cult
."
has also been subject to vandalism and protected under Wikipedia's Protection Policy.
The second dispute reported by Nature involved the climatologist William Connolley
related to protracted disputes between editors of climate change topics, in which Connolley was placed on parole and several opponents banned from editing climate related articles for six months; a separate paper commented that this was more about etiquette than bias and that Connolley did "not suffer[] fools gladly".
Wikipedia
Wikipedia is a free, web-based, collaborative, multilingual encyclopedia project supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Its 20 million articles have been written collaboratively by volunteers around the world. Almost all of its articles can be edited by anyone with access to the site,...
(primarily of the English language version
English Wikipedia
The English Wikipedia is the English-language edition of the free online encyclopedia Wikipedia. Founded on 15 January 2001 and reaching three million articles by August 2009, it was the first edition of Wikipedia and remains the largest, with almost three times as many articles as the next...
), compared to other encyclopedia
Encyclopedia
An encyclopedia is a type of reference work, a compendium holding a summary of information from either all branches of knowledge or a particular branch of knowledge....
s and more specialized sources, is assessed in many ways, including statistically
Statistics
Statistics is the study of the collection, organization, analysis, and interpretation of data. It deals with all aspects of this, including the planning of data collection in terms of the design of surveys and experiments....
, through comparative review, analysis of the historical patterns, and strengths and weaknesses inherent in the editing process unique to Wikipedia.
Several studies have been done to assess the reliability of Wikipedia. A notable early study in the journal Nature
Nature (journal)
Nature, first published on 4 November 1869, is ranked the world's most cited interdisciplinary scientific journal by the Science Edition of the 2010 Journal Citation Reports...
said that in 2005, Wikipedia scientific articles came close to the level of accuracy in Encyclopædia Britannica
Encyclopædia Britannica
The Encyclopædia Britannica , published by Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., is a general knowledge English-language encyclopaedia that is available in print, as a DVD, and on the Internet. It is written and continuously updated by about 100 full-time editors and more than 4,000 expert...
and had a similar rate of "serious errors". The study by Nature was disputed by Encyclopædia Britannica, and later Nature responded to this refutation with both a formal response and a point-by-point rebuttal of Britannicas main objections. Between 2008 and 2010, articles in medical and scientific fields such as pathology
Pathology
Pathology is the precise study and diagnosis of disease. The word pathology is from Ancient Greek , pathos, "feeling, suffering"; and , -logia, "the study of". Pathologization, to pathologize, refers to the process of defining a condition or behavior as pathological, e.g. pathological gambling....
, toxicology
Toxicology
Toxicology is a branch of biology, chemistry, and medicine concerned with the study of the adverse effects of chemicals on living organisms...
, oncology
Oncology
Oncology is a branch of medicine that deals with cancer...
and pharmaceuticals comparing Wikipedia to professional and peer-reviewed sources found that Wikipedia's depth and coverage were of a high standard. Concerns regarding readability have been raised. However, omissions sometimes remained an issue, at times due to public relations
Public relations
Public relations is the actions of a corporation, store, government, individual, etc., in promoting goodwill between itself and the public, the community, employees, customers, etc....
removal of adverse product information.
Wikipedia is open to anonymous and collaborative editing
Collaborative editing
Collaborative editing is the practice of groups producing works together through individual contributions. Effective choices in group awareness, participation, and coordination are critical to successful collaborative writing outcomes. Most usually it is applied to textual documents or...
, so assessments of its reliability usually include examinations of how quickly false or misleading information is removed. An early study conducted by IBM
IBM
International Business Machines Corporation or IBM is an American multinational technology and consulting corporation headquartered in Armonk, New York, United States. IBM manufactures and sells computer hardware and software, and it offers infrastructure, hosting and consulting services in areas...
researchers in 2003—two years following Wikipedia's establishment—found that "vandalism is usually repaired extremely quickly — so quickly that most users will never see its effects" and concluded that Wikipedia had "surprisingly effective self-healing capabilities". A 2007 peer-reviewed study stated that "42% of damage is repaired almost immediately... Nonetheless, there are still hundreds of millions of damaged views."
Several incidents have also been publicized in which false information has lasted for a long time in Wikipedia. In May 2005, a user edited the biographical
Biography
A biography is a detailed description or account of someone's life. More than a list of basic facts , biography also portrays the subject's experience of those events...
article on John Seigenthaler Sr. so that it contained several false and defamatory statements. The inaccurate information went unnoticed until September 2005, when they were discovered by a friend of Seigenthaler. After the information was removed from Wikipedia, it remained for another three weeks on sites which mirror Wikipedia content. A biographical article in French Wikipedia portrayed Léon-Robert de L’Astran as an 18th century anti-slavery ship owner, which led Ségolène Royal
Ségolène Royal
Marie-Ségolène Royal , known as Ségolène Royal, is a French politician. She is the president of the Poitou-Charentes Regional Council, a former member of the National Assembly, a former government minister, and a prominent member of the French Socialist Party...
, a presidential candidate, to praise him. A student investigation later determined that the article was a hoax and de L’Astran had never existed.
Wikipedia editing model
The Wikipedia model allows anyone to edit, and relies on a large number of well-intentioned editors to overcome issues raised by a smaller number of problematic editors. It is inherent in Wikipedia's editing model that misleading information can be added, but over time quality is anticipated to improve in a form of group learning as editors reach consensus, so that substandard edits will very rapidly be removed. This assumption is still being tested, and its limitations and reliability are not yet a settled matter. Wikipedia is a pioneer in communal knowledge buildingKnowledge building
The Knowledge Building theory was created and developed by Carl Bereiter and Marlene Scardamalia for describing what a community of learners needs to accomplish in order to create knowledge...
of this kind. It contrasts with many more traditional models of knowledge and publishing
Publishing
Publishing is the process of production and dissemination of literature or information—the activity of making information available to the general public...
, which attempt to limit content creation to a relatively small group of approved editors in order to exercise strong hierarchical
Hierarchy
A hierarchy is an arrangement of items in which the items are represented as being "above," "below," or "at the same level as" one another...
control. In order to improve reliability, some editors have called for "stable versions" of articles, or articles that have been reviewed by the community and locked from further editing.
Wikipedia allows anonymous editing: contributors are not required to provide any identification, or even an email address. A 2007 study at Dartmouth College
Dartmouth College
Dartmouth College is a private, Ivy League university in Hanover, New Hampshire, United States. The institution comprises a liberal arts college, Dartmouth Medical School, Thayer School of Engineering, and the Tuck School of Business, as well as 19 graduate programs in the arts and sciences...
of the English Wikipedia noted that, contrary to usual social expectations, anonymous editors were some of Wikipedia's most productive contributors of valid content. The Dartmouth study was criticized by John Timmer of the Ars Technica
Ars Technica
Ars Technica is a technology news and information website created by Ken Fisher and Jon Stokes in 1998. It publishes news, reviews and guides on issues such as computer hardware and software, science, technology policy, and video games. Ars Technica is known for its features, long articles that go...
website for its methodological shortcomings.
While Wikipedia has the potential for extremely rapid growth and harnesses an entire community—much in the same way as other communal projects such as Linux
Linux
Linux is a Unix-like computer operating system assembled under the model of free and open source software development and distribution. The defining component of any Linux system is the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released October 5, 1991 by Linus Torvalds...
—it goes further in trusting the same community to self-regulate and become more proficient at quality control
Quality control
Quality control, or QC for short, is a process by which entities review the quality of all factors involved in production. This approach places an emphasis on three aspects:...
. Wikipedia has harnessed the work of millions of people to produce the world's largest knowledge-based site along with software to support it, resulting in more than nineteen million articles written, across more than 280 different language versions, in less than twelve years. For this reason, there has been considerable interest in the project both academically and from diverse fields such as information technology
Information technology
Information technology is the acquisition, processing, storage and dissemination of vocal, pictorial, textual and numerical information by a microelectronics-based combination of computing and telecommunications...
, business
Business
A business is an organization engaged in the trade of goods, services, or both to consumers. Businesses are predominant in capitalist economies, where most of them are privately owned and administered to earn profit to increase the wealth of their owners. Businesses may also be not-for-profit...
, project management
Project management
Project management is the discipline of planning, organizing, securing, and managing resources to achieve specific goals. A project is a temporary endeavor with a defined beginning and end , undertaken to meet unique goals and objectives, typically to bring about beneficial change or added value...
, knowledge acquisition, software programming, other collaborative projects
Collaboration
Collaboration is working together to achieve a goal. It is a recursive process where two or more people or organizations work together to realize shared goals, — for example, an intriguing endeavor that is creative in nature—by sharing...
and sociology
Sociology
Sociology is the study of society. It is a social science—a term with which it is sometimes synonymous—which uses various methods of empirical investigation and critical analysis to develop a body of knowledge about human social activity...
, to explore whether the Wikipedia model can produce quality results, what collaboration in this way can reveal about people, and whether the scale of involvement can overcome the obstacles of individual limitations and poor editorship which would otherwise arise.
Another reason for inquiry is a growing and widespread reliance on Wikipedia by both websites and individuals, who use it as a source of information, raising concerns over such a major source being susceptible to rapid change, including the whimsical introduction of misinformation. It is the responsibility of those who intend to use such a dynamically changing, multi-authored source to ascertain the quality and reliability of articles, and the degree of usefulness, misinformation or vandalism
Vandalism
Vandalism is the behaviour attributed originally to the Vandals, by the Romans, in respect of culture: ruthless destruction or spoiling of anything beautiful or venerable...
which might be expected, in order to decide what reliance to place upon them. A helpful safeguard is always to reference Wikipedia accurately when it is quoted to allow false or unreliable material to be identified and corrected.
Areas of reliability
The reliability of Wikipedia articles can be measured by the following criteria:- Accuracy of information provided within articles
- Appropriateness of the images provided with the article
- Appropriateness of the style and focus of the articles
- Susceptibility to, and exclusion and removal of, false information
- Comprehensiveness, scope and coverage within articles and in the range of articles
- Identification of reputable third-party sourcesSource textA source text is a text from which information or ideas are derived. In translation, a source text is the original text that is to be translated into another language.-Description:...
as citationCitationBroadly, a citation is a reference to a published or unpublished source . More precisely, a citation is an abbreviated alphanumeric expression Broadly, a citation is a reference to a published or unpublished source (not always the original source). More precisely, a citation is an abbreviated...
s - Stability of the articles
- Susceptibility to editorial and systemic biasSystemic biasSystemic bias is the inherent tendency of a process to favor particular outcomes. The term is a neologism that generally refers to human systems; the analogous problem in non-human systems is often called systematic bias, and leads to systematic error in measurements or estimates.-Bias in...
- Quality of writing
The first four of these have been the subjects of various studies of the project, while the presence of bias is strongly disputed on both sides, and the prevalence and quality of citations can be tested within Wikipedia.
Comparative studies
On October 24, 2005, British newspaper The GuardianThe Guardian
The Guardian, formerly known as The Manchester Guardian , is a British national daily newspaper in the Berliner format...
published a story titled "Can you trust Wikipedia?" in which a panel of experts was asked to review seven entries related to their fields, giving each article reviewed a number designation out of ten points. Scores ranged from 0 to 8, but most received marks between 5 and 8. The most common criticisms were:
- Poor prose, or ease-of-reading issues (3 mentions)
- Omissions or inaccuracies, often small but including key omissions in some articles (3 mentions)
- Poor balance, with less important areas being given more attention and vice versa (1 mention)
The most common praises were:
- Factually sound and correct, no glaring inaccuracies (4 mentions)
- Much useful information, including well selected links, making it possible to "access much information quickly" (3 mentions)
In December 2005, the journal Nature
Nature (journal)
Nature, first published on 4 November 1869, is ranked the world's most cited interdisciplinary scientific journal by the Science Edition of the 2010 Journal Citation Reports...
conducted a single-blind study comparing the accuracy of a sample of articles from Wikipedia and Encyclopædia Britannica
Encyclopædia Britannica
The Encyclopædia Britannica , published by Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., is a general knowledge English-language encyclopaedia that is available in print, as a DVD, and on the Internet. It is written and continuously updated by about 100 full-time editors and more than 4,000 expert...
. The sample included 42 articles on scientific topics, including biographies of well-known scientists. The articles were compared for accuracy by academic reviewers who remained anonymous − a customary practice for journal article reviews. Based on their review, the average Wikipedia article contained 4 errors or omissions; the average Britannica article, 3. Only 4 serious errors were found in Wikipedia, and 4 in Encyclopædia Britannica. The study concluded: "Wikipedia comes close to Britannica in terms of the accuracy of its science entries", although Wikipedia's articles were often "poorly structured".
Encyclopædia Britannica expressed concerns, leading Nature to release further documentation of its survey method. Based on this additional information, Encyclopædia Britannica denied the validity of the Nature study, stating that it was "fatally flawed". Among Britannicas criticisms were that excerpts rather than the full texts of some of their articles were used, that some of the extracts were compilations that included articles written for the youth version, that Nature did not check the factual assertions of its reviewers, and that many points which the reviewers labeled as errors were differences of editorial opinion. Nature acknowledged the compiled nature of some of the Britannica extracts, but denied that this invalidated the conclusions of the study. Encyclopædia Britannica also argued that while the Nature study showed that the error rate between the two encyclopedias was similar, a breakdown of the errors indicated that the mistakes in Wikipedia were more often the inclusion of incorrect facts, while the mistakes in Britannica were "errors of omission", making "Britannica far more accurate than Wikipedia, according to the figures". Nature has since rejected the Britannica response, stating that any errors on the part of its reviewers were not biased in favor of either encyclopedia, that in some cases it used excerpts of articles from both encyclopedias, and that Britannica did not share particular concerns with Nature before publishing its "open letter" rebuttal.
In June 2006, Roy Rosenzweig
Roy Rosenzweig
-References:* * * Memorial website-External links:* Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media**...
, a professor specializing in American history, published a comparison of the Wikipedia biographies of 25 Americans to the corresponding biographies found on Encarta and American National Biography Online. He wrote that Wikipedia is "surprisingly accurate in reporting names, dates, and events in U.S. history", with some of the errors being "widely held but inaccurate beliefs". However, he stated that Wikipedia often fails to distinguish important from trivial details, and does not provide the best references. He also complained about Wikipedia's lack of "persuasive analysis and interpretations, and clear and engaging prose."
A web-based survey conducted from December 2005 to May 2006 by Larry Press, a professor of Information Systems at California State University at Dominguez Hills, assessed the "accuracy and completeness of Wikipedia articles". Fifty people (a fairly low response rate) accepted an invitation to assess an article. Of the fifty, thirty-eight (76%) agreed or strongly agreed that the Wikipedia article was accurate, and twenty-three (46%) agreed or strongly agreed that it was complete. Eighteen people compared the article they reviewed to the article on the same topic in the Encyclopædia Britannica
Encyclopædia Britannica
The Encyclopædia Britannica , published by Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., is a general knowledge English-language encyclopaedia that is available in print, as a DVD, and on the Internet. It is written and continuously updated by about 100 full-time editors and more than 4,000 expert...
. Opinions on accuracy were almost equal between the two encyclopedias (6 favoring Britannica, 7 favoring Wikipedia, 5 stating they were equal), and eleven (61%) found Wikipedia somewhat or substantially more complete, compared to seven (39%) for Britannica. The survey did not attempt random selection of the participants, and it is not clear how the participants were invited.
The German computing magazine c't
C't
c't – Magazin für Computertechnik is a German computer magazine, published by the Heinz Heise publishing house. Originally a special section of the electronics magazine elrad, the magazine has been published monthly since December 1983 and biweekly since October 1997...
performed a comparison of Brockhaus Multimedial, Microsoft Encarta
Encarta
Microsoft Encarta was a digital multimedia encyclopedia published by Microsoft Corporation from 1993 to 2009. , the complete English version, Encarta Premium, consisted of more than 62,000 articles, numerous photos and illustrations, music clips, videos, interactive contents, timelines, maps and...
, and the German Wikipedia
German Wikipedia
The German Wikipedia is the German-language edition of Wikipedia, a free and mostly publicly editable online encyclopedia.Founded in March 2001, it is the second-oldest and, with over articles, the second-largest edition of Wikipedia, behind the English Wikipedia...
in October 2004: Experts evaluated 66 articles in various fields. In overall score, Wikipedia was rated 3.6 out of 5 points (B-). A second test by c't in February 2007 used 150 search terms, of which 56 were closely evaluated, to compare four digital encyclopedias: Bertelsmann
Bertelsmann
Bertelsmann AG is a multinational media corporation founded in 1835, based in Gütersloh, Germany. The company operates in 63 countries and employs 102,983 workers , which makes it the most international media corporation in the world. In 2008 the company reported a €16.118 billion consolidated...
Enzyklopädie 2007, Brockhaus Multimedial premium 2007, Encarta 2007 Enzyklopädie and Wikipedia. It concluded: "We did not find more errors in the texts of the free encyclopedia than in those of its commercial competitors."
Viewing Wikipedia as fitting the economists' definition of a perfectly competitive marketplace of ideas, George Bragues (University of Guelph-Humber
University of Guelph-Humber
The University of Guelph-Humber is a university-college partnership between the University of Guelph and Humber College. It was established in 2002. It is located on Humber's North Campus in Toronto, Ontario, Canada...
), examined Wikipedia's articles on seven top Western philosophers: Aristotle
Aristotle
Aristotle was a Greek philosopher and polymath, a student of Plato and teacher of Alexander the Great. His writings cover many subjects, including physics, metaphysics, poetry, theater, music, logic, rhetoric, linguistics, politics, government, ethics, biology, and zoology...
, Plato
Plato
Plato , was a Classical Greek philosopher, mathematician, student of Socrates, writer of philosophical dialogues, and founder of the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world. Along with his mentor, Socrates, and his student, Aristotle, Plato helped to lay the...
, Immanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant was a German philosopher from Königsberg , researching, lecturing and writing on philosophy and anthropology at the end of the 18th Century Enlightenment....
, René Descartes
René Descartes
René Descartes ; was a French philosopher and writer who spent most of his adult life in the Dutch Republic. He has been dubbed the 'Father of Modern Philosophy', and much subsequent Western philosophy is a response to his writings, which are studied closely to this day...
, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was a German philosopher, one of the creators of German Idealism. His historicist and idealist account of reality as a whole revolutionized European philosophy and was an important precursor to Continental philosophy and Marxism.Hegel developed a comprehensive...
, Thomas Aquinas
Thomas Aquinas
Thomas Aquinas, O.P. , also Thomas of Aquin or Aquino, was an Italian Dominican priest of the Catholic Church, and an immensely influential philosopher and theologian in the tradition of scholasticism, known as Doctor Angelicus, Doctor Communis, or Doctor Universalis...
, and John Locke
John Locke
John Locke FRS , widely known as the Father of Liberalism, was an English philosopher and physician regarded as one of the most influential of Enlightenment thinkers. Considered one of the first of the British empiricists, following the tradition of Francis Bacon, he is equally important to social...
. Wikipedia's articles were compared to a consensus list of themes culled from four reference works in philosophy. Bragues found that, on average, Wikipedia's articles only covered 52% of consensus themes. No errors were found, though there were significant omissions.
PC Pro
PC Pro
PC Pro is one of several computer magazines published monthly in the United Kingdom by Dennis Publishing. PC Pro also licenses individual articles for republication in various countries around the world - and some articles are translated into local languages...
magazine (August 2007) asked experts to compare four articles (a small sample
Sample size
Sample size determination is the act of choosing the number of observations to include in a statistical sample. The sample size is an important feature of any empirical study in which the goal is to make inferences about a population from a sample...
) in their scientific fields between Wikipedia, Britannica and Encarta. In each case Wikipedia was described as "largely sound", "well handled", "performs well", "good for the bare facts" and "broadly accurate." One article had "a marked deterioration towards the end" while another had "clearer and more elegant" writing, a third was assessed as less well written but better detailed than its competitors, and a fourth was "of more benefit to the serious student than its Encarta or Britannica equivalents." No serious errors were noted in Wikipedia articles, whereas serious errors were noted in one Encarta and one Britannica article.
In October 2007, Australian magazine PC Authority published a feature article on the accuracy of Wikipedia. The article compared Wikipedia's content to other popular online encyclopedias, namely Britannica and Encarta
Encarta
Microsoft Encarta was a digital multimedia encyclopedia published by Microsoft Corporation from 1993 to 2009. , the complete English version, Encarta Premium, consisted of more than 62,000 articles, numerous photos and illustrations, music clips, videos, interactive contents, timelines, maps and...
. The magazine asked experts to evaluate articles pertaining to their field. Wikipedia was comparable to the other encyclopedias, topping the chemistry category.
In December 2007, German magazine Stern
Stern (magazine)
Stern is a weekly news magazine published in Germany. It was founded in 1948 by Henri Nannen, and is currently published by Gruner + Jahr, a subsidiary of Bertelsmann. In the first quarter of 2006, its print run was 1.019 million copies and it reached 7.84 million readers according to...
published the results of a comparison between the German Wikipedia and the online version of the 15-volume edition of Brockhaus Enzyklopädie
Brockhaus Enzyklopädie
The Brockhaus Enzyklopädie is a German-language encyclopedia published by Brockhaus.The first edition originated in the Conversations-Lexikon mit vorzüglicher Rücksicht auf die gegenwärtigen Zeiten by Renatus Gotthelf Löbel and Christian Wilhelm Franke, published in Leipzig 1796-1808...
. The test was commissioned to a research institute (Cologne-based WIND GmbH), whose analysts assessed 50 articles from each encyclopedia (covering politics, business, sports, science, culture, entertainment, geography, medicine, history and religion) on four criteria (accuracy, completeness, timeliness and clarity), and judged Wikipedia articles to be more accurate on the average (1.6 on a scale from 1 to 6, versus 2.3 for Brockhaus with 1 as the best and 6 as the worst). Wikipedia's coverage was also found to be more complete and up to date; however, Brockhaus was judged to be more clearly written, while several Wikipedia articles were criticized as being too complicated for non-experts, and many as too lengthy.
In its April 2008 issue British computing magazine PC Plus
PC Plus
PC Plus is a Computer magazine published monthly since 1986 in the UK by Future Publishing. The magazine is aimed at intermediate to advanced PC users, computer professionals and enthusiasts. The magazine is specifically for users of PCs and related technologies, so features articles are...
compared the English Wikipedia with the DVD editions of World Book Encyclopedia and Encyclopædia Britannica, assessing for each the coverage of a series of random subjects. It concluded The quality of content is good in all three cases and advised Wikipedia users Be aware that erroneous edits do occur, and check anything that seems outlandish with a second source. But the vast majority of Wikipedia is filled with valuable and accurate information.
Librarian views
In a 2004 interview with The GuardianThe Guardian
The Guardian, formerly known as The Manchester Guardian , is a British national daily newspaper in the Berliner format...
, self-described information specialist and Internet consultant Philip Bradley said that he would not use Wikipedia and was "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 are reliable, as their livelihood depends on it. But with something like this, all that goes out the window."
A 2006 review of Wikipedia by Library Journal
Library Journal
Library Journal is a trade publication for librarians. It was founded in 1876 by Melvil Dewey . It reports news about the library world, emphasizing public libraries, and offers feature articles about aspects of professional practice...
, using a panel of librarians, "the toughest critics of reference materials, whatever their format", asked "long standing reviewers" to evaluate three areas of Wikipedia (popular culture, current affairs, and science), and concluded: "While there are still reasons to proceed with caution when using a resource that takes pride in limited professional management, many encouraging signs suggest that (at least for now) Wikipedia may be granted the librarian's seal of approval". A reviewer who "decided to explore controversial historical and current events, hoping to find glaring abuses" concluded "I was pleased by Wikipedia's objective presentation of controversial subjects" but that "as with much information floating around in cyberspace, a healthy degree of skepticism and skill at winnowing fact from opinion are required." Other reviewers noted that there is "much variation" but "good content abounds."
In 2007, Michael Gorman
Michael Gorman (librarian)
Michael Gorman is a British-born librarian, library scholar and editor/writer on library issues noted for his traditional views. During his tenure as president of the American Library Association , he was vocal in his opinions on a range of subjects, notably technology and education...
, former president of the American Library Association (ALA) stated in an Encyclopædia Britannica
Encyclopædia Britannica
The Encyclopædia Britannica , published by Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., is a general knowledge English-language encyclopaedia that is available in print, as a DVD, and on the Internet. It is written and continuously updated by about 100 full-time editors and more than 4,000 expert...
blog that "A professor who encourages the use of Wikipedia is the intellectual equivalent of a dietician who recommends a steady diet of Big Macs with everything."
The library at Trent University
Trent University
Trent University is a liberal arts and science-oriented institution located along the Otonabee River in Peterborough, Ontario, Canada.The enabling legislation is the Trent University Act, 1962-63. The University was founded through the efforts of a citizens' committee interested in creating a...
in Ontario
Ontario
Ontario is a province of Canada, located in east-central Canada. It is Canada's most populous province and second largest in total area. It is home to the nation's most populous city, Toronto, and the nation's capital, Ottawa....
states of Wikipedia that many articles are "long and comprehensive", but that there is "a lot of room for misinformation and bias [and] a lot of variability in both the quality and depth of articles." It adds that Wikipedia has advantages and limitations, that it has "excellent coverage of technical topics" and articles are "often added quickly and, as a result, coverage of current events is quite good", comparing this to traditional sources which are unable to achieve this task. It concludes that depending upon the need, one should think critically and assess the appropriateness of one's sources, "whether you are looking for fact or opinion, how in-depth you want to be as you explore a topic, the importance of reliability and accuracy, and the importance of timely or recent information", and adds that Wikipedia can be used in any event as a "starting point."
An article for the Canadian Library Association
Canadian Library Association
The Canadian Library Association is a national, predominantly English-language association which represents 57,000 library workers across the country. It also speaks for the interests of the 21 million Canadians who are members of libraries...
(CLA) discusses the Wikipedia approach, process and outcome in depth, commenting for example that in controversial topics, "what is most remarkable is that the two sides actually engaged each other and negotiated a version of the article that both can more or less live with." The author comments that:
Information Today (March 2006) cites librarian Nancy O’Neill (principal librarian for Reference Services at the Santa Monica Public Library System) as saying that "there is a good deal of skepticism about Wikipedia in the library community" but that "she also admits cheerfully that Wikipedia makes a good starting place for a search. You get terminology, names, and a feel for the subject."
PC Pro (August 2007) cites the head of the European and American Collection at the British Library
British Library
The British Library is the national library of the United Kingdom, and is the world's largest library in terms of total number of items. The library is a major research library, holding over 150 million items from every country in the world, in virtually all known languages and in many formats,...
, Stephen Bury, as stating "Wikipedia is potentially a good thing – it provides a speedier response to new events, and to new evidence on old items." The article concludes: "For [Bury], the problem isn't so much the reliability of Wikipedia's content so much as the way in which it's used. "It's already become the first port of call for the researcher", Bury says, before noting that this is "not necessarily problematic except when they go no further." According to Bury, the trick to using Wikipedia is to understand that "just because it's in an encyclopedia (free, web or printed) doesn't mean it's true. Ask for evidence .. and contribute."
Academia
Academics have also criticized Wikipedia for its perceived failure as a reliable source, and because Wikipedia editors may not have degrees or other credentials generally recognized in academia. For that reason, the use of Wikipedia is not accepted in many schools and universities in writing a formal paper, and some educational institutions have banned it as a primary source while others have limited its use to only a pointer to external sources. This criticism, however, may not only apply to Wikipedia but to encyclopedias in general – some university lecturerLecturer
Lecturer is an academic rank. In the United Kingdom, lecturer is a position at a university or similar institution, often held by academics in their early career stages, who lead research groups and supervise research students, as well as teach...
s are not impressed when students cite print-based encyclopedias in assigned work.
An empirical study conducted in 2006 by a Nottingham University Business School lecturer in Information Systems, the subject of a review on the technical website Ars Technica
Ars Technica
Ars Technica is a technology news and information website created by Ken Fisher and Jon Stokes in 1998. It publishes news, reviews and guides on issues such as computer hardware and software, science, technology policy, and video games. Ars Technica is known for its features, long articles that go...
, involving 55 academics asked to review specific Wikipedia articles that either were in their expert field (group 1) or chosen at random (group 2), concluded that "The experts found Wikipedia's articles to be more credible than the non–experts. This suggests that the accuracy of Wikipedia is high. However, the results should not be seen as support for Wikipedia as a totally reliable resource as, according to the experts, 13 percent of the articles contain mistakes (10% of the experts reported factual errors of an unspecified degree, 3% of them reported spelling errors)."
The Gould Library at Carleton College
Carleton College
Carleton College is an independent non-sectarian, coeducational, liberal arts college in Northfield, Minnesota, USA. The college enrolls 1,958 undergraduate students, and employs 198 full-time faculty members. In 2012 U.S...
in Minnesota
Minnesota
Minnesota is a U.S. state located in the Midwestern United States. The twelfth largest state of the U.S., it is the twenty-first most populous, with 5.3 million residents. Minnesota was carved out of the eastern half of the Minnesota Territory and admitted to the Union as the thirty-second state...
has a web-page describing the use of Wikipedia in academia. It asserts that "Wikipedia is without question a valuable and informative resource", but that "there is an inherent lack of reliability and stability" to its articles, again drawing attention to similar advantages and limitations as other sources. As with other reviews it comments that one should assess one's sources and what is desired from them, and that "Wikipedia may be an appropriate resource for some assignments, but not for others." It cited Jimmy Wales' view that Wikipedia may not be ideal as a source for all academic uses, and (as with other sources) suggests that at the least, one strength of Wikipedia is that it provides a good starting point for current information on a very wide range of topics.
In 2007, the Chronicle of Higher Education published an article written by Cathy Davidson
Cathy Davidson
Cathy N. Davidson is an American scholar and university professor. She has served as the Ruth F. DeVarney Professor of English at Duke University since 1996 and has held a second distinguished chair as the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies since 2006...
, Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies and English at Duke University
Duke University
Duke University is a private research university located in Durham, North Carolina, United States. Founded by Methodists and Quakers in the present day town of Trinity in 1838, the school moved to Durham in 1892. In 1924, tobacco industrialist James B...
, in which she asserts that Wikipedia should be used to teach students about the concepts of reliability and credibility.
In 2008, Hamlet Isakhanli
Hamlet Isakhanli
Hamlet Abdulla oglu Isayev is an Azerbaijani mathematician, poet, science- and sosial science writer, living founder of Khazar University and founding president during April, 1991 - September, 2010...
, founder and president of Khazar University
Khazar University
Khazar University is a private university located in Baku, Azerbaijan.-Campuses:...
, compared the Encyclopædia Britannica and English Wikipedia articles on Azerbaijan
Azerbaijan
Azerbaijan , officially the Republic of Azerbaijan is the largest country in the Caucasus region of Eurasia. Located at the crossroads of Western Asia and Eastern Europe, it is bounded by the Caspian Sea to the east, Russia to the north, Georgia to the northwest, Armenia to the west, and Iran to...
and related subjects. His study found that Wikipedia covered the subject much more widely, more accurately and in more detail, though with some lack of balance, and that Wikipedia was the best source for the first approximation.
Steve Jones, a professor of communication at the University of Illinois at Chicago, said that the number of Wikipedia articles is so large that it "seems impossible that they could police it in an effective way".
Geoffrey Nunberg
Geoffrey Nunberg
Geoffrey Nunberg is an American linguist and a professor at the UC Berkeley School of Information. Nunberg has taught at Stanford University and served as a principal scientist at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center from the mid-1980's to 2000...
, an adjunct full professor at UC Berkeley's School of Information, has criticized Wikipedia for relying too much on citing sources even though the said sources may not be more accurate than Wikipedia itself.
Some academic journals do refer to Wikipedia articles, but are not elevating it to the same level as traditional references. For instance, Wikipedia articles have been referenced in "enhanced perspectives" provided on-line in the journal Science
Science (journal)
Science is the academic journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and is one of the world's top scientific journals....
. The first of these perspectives to provide a hyperlink to Wikipedia was "A White Collar Protein Senses Blue Light", and dozens of enhanced perspectives have provided such links since then. The publisher of Science states that these enhanced perspectives "include hypernotes – which link directly to websites of other relevant information available online – beyond the standard bibliographic references".
Science and medicine
Science and medicine are areas where accuracy is of high importance and peer reviewPeer review
Peer review is a process of self-regulation by a profession or a process of evaluation involving qualified individuals within the relevant field. Peer review methods are employed to maintain standards, improve performance and provide credibility...
is the norm. While some of Wikipedia's content has passed a form of peer review, most has not.
A 2008 study examined 80 Wikipedia drug entries. The researchers found few factual errors in this set of articles, but determined that these articles were often missing important information, like contraindications and drug interactions. One of the researchers noted that "If people went and used this as a sole or authoritative source without contacting a health professional...those are the types of negative impacts that can occur." The researchers also compared Wikipedia to Medscape Drug Reference (MDR), by looking for answers to 80 different questions covering eight categories of drug information, including adverse drug events, dosages, and mechanism of action. They have determined that MDR provided answers to 82.5 percent of the questions, while Wikipedia could only answer 40 percent, and that answers were less likely to be complete for Wikipedia as well. None of the answers from Wikipedia were determined factually inaccurate, while they found four inaccurate answers in MDR. But the researchers found 48 errors of omission in the Wikipedia entries, compared to 14 for MDR. The lead investigator concluded: "I think that these errors of omission can be just as dangerous [as inaccuracies]", and he pointed out that drug company representatives have been caught deleting information from Wikipedia entries that make their drugs look unsafe.
A 2009 survey asked US toxicologists how accurately they rated the portrayal of health risks of chemicals in different media sources. It was based on the answers of 937 members of the Society of Toxicology
Society of Toxicology
The Society of Toxicology is a learned society based in the United States that supports scientific inquiry in the field of toxicology. Its definition of toxicology is...
and found that these experts regarded Wikipedia's reliability in this area as far higher than that of all traditional news media:
In 2010 researchers compared 10 types of cancer to data from the National Cancer Institute
National Cancer Institute
The National Cancer Institute is part of the National Institutes of Health , which is one of 11 agencies that are part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The NCI coordinates the U.S...
's Physician Data Query and concluded "the Wiki resource had similar accuracy and depth to the professionally edited database" and that "sub-analysis comparing common to uncommon cancers demonstrated no difference between the two", but that ease of readability was an issue.
A study in 2011 came to the result that categories most frequently absent in Wikipedia's drug articles are those of drug interactions and medication use in breastfeeding. Other categories with incomplete coverage were descriptions of off-label indications, contraindications and precautions, adverse drug events and dosing. Information most frequently deviating from other sources used in the study were that of contraindications and precautions, drug absorption and adverse drug events.
Editors of other encyclopedias
In a 2004 piece called "The Faith-Based Encyclopedia", Robert McHenryRobert McHenry
Robert Dale McHenry is an American editor, encyclopedist, and writer. McHenry worked from 1967 for Encyclopædia Britannica Inc. or associated companies, becoming editor-in-chief of the Encyclopædia Britannica in 1992, a position he held until 1997...
, a former editor-in-chief of Encyclopædia Britannica
Encyclopædia Britannica
The Encyclopædia Britannica , published by Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., is a general knowledge English-language encyclopaedia that is available in print, as a DVD, and on the Internet. It is written and continuously updated by about 100 full-time editors and more than 4,000 expert...
, stated that Wikipedia errs in billing itself as an encyclopedia, because that word implies a level of authority and accountability that he believes cannot be possessed by an openly editable reference. McHenry argued that "the typical user doesn't know how conventional encyclopedias achieve reliability, only that they do." He added:
Similarly, Britannica
The Guardian
The Guardian, formerly known as The Manchester Guardian , is a British national daily newspaper in the Berliner format...
as saying:
In the September 12, 2006 edition of The Wall Street Journal
The Wall Street Journal
The Wall Street Journal is an American English-language international daily newspaper. It is published in New York City by Dow Jones & Company, a division of News Corporation, along with the Asian and European editions of the Journal....
, Jimmy Wales
Jimmy Wales
Jimmy Donal "Jimbo" Wales is an American Internet entrepreneur best known as a co-founder and promoter of the online non-profit encyclopedia Wikipedia and the Wikia company....
debated with Dale Hoiberg
Dale Hoiberg
Dale Hollis Hoiberg is a sinologist and has been the editor-in-chief of the Encyclopædia Britannica since 1997. He holds a Ph.D. degree in Chinese literature and began to work for Encyclopædia Britannica as an index editor in 1978.-External links:*...
, editor-in-chief of Encyclopædia Britannica
Encyclopædia Britannica
The Encyclopædia Britannica , published by Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., is a general knowledge English-language encyclopaedia that is available in print, as a DVD, and on the Internet. It is written and continuously updated by about 100 full-time editors and more than 4,000 expert...
. Hoiberg focused on a need for expertise and control in an encyclopedia and cited Lewis Mumford
Lewis Mumford
Lewis Mumford was an American historian, philosopher of technology, and influential literary critic. Particularly noted for his study of cities and urban architecture, he had a broad career as a writer...
that overwhelming information could "bring about a state of intellectual enervation and depletion hardly to be distinguished from massive ignorance."
Wales emphasized Wikipedia's differences, and asserted that openness and transparency lead to quality. Hoiberg claimed that he "had neither the time nor space to respond to [criticisms]" and "could corral any number of links to articles alleging errors in Wikipedia", to which Wales responded: "No problem! Wikipedia to the rescue with a fine article", and included a link to the Wikipedia article Criticism of Wikipedia.
Other
In one article, Information Today (March 2006) likens comparisons between Wikipedia and Britannica to "Apples and OrangesApples and oranges
A comparison of apples and oranges occurs when two items or groups of items are compared that cannot be validly compared.The idiom, comparing apples and oranges, refers to the apparent differences between items which are popularly thought to be incomparable or incommensurable, such as apples and...
":
BBC
BBC
The British Broadcasting Corporation is a British public service broadcaster. Its headquarters is at Broadcasting House in the City of Westminster, London. It is the largest broadcaster in the world, with about 23,000 staff...
technology
Technology
Technology is the making, usage, and knowledge of tools, machines, techniques, crafts, systems or methods of organization in order to solve a problem or perform a specific function. It can also refer to the collection of such tools, machinery, and procedures. The word technology comes ;...
specialist Bill Thompson
Bill Thompson (technology writer)
Bill Thompson is an English technology writer, best known for his weekly column in the Technology section of BBC News Online and his appearances on Click, a radio show on the BBC World Service. He is also an Honorary Senior Visiting Fellow at City University London .Born in Jarrow, Thompson grew...
wrote that "Most Wikipedia entries are written and submitted in good faith, and we should not let the contentious areas such as politics, religion or biography shape our view of the project as a whole", that it forms a good starting point for serious research but that:
Thompson adds the observation that since most popular online sources are inherently unreliable in this way, one byproduct of the information age
Information Age
The Information Age, also commonly known as the Computer Age or Digital Age, is an idea that the current age will be characterized by the ability of individuals to transfer information freely, and to have instant access to knowledge that would have been difficult or impossible to find previously...
is a wiser audience who are learning to check information rather than take it on faith due to its source, leading to "a better sense of how to evaluate information sources."
The Supreme Court of India in its judgment in Commr. of Customs, Bangalore vs. ACER India Pvt. (Citation 2007(12)SCALE581) has held that "We have referred to Wikipedia, as the learned Counsel for the parties relied thereupon. It is an online encyclopaedia and information can be entered therein by any person and as such it may not be authentic."
In his 2007 Guide to Military History on the Internet, Simon Fowler
Simon Fowler (author)
Simon Fowler is an English social historian and author.Fowler is currently editor of Ancestors, the family history magazine of the National Archives, and has written many books relating to family and social history. He edited Family History Monthly from 2000 to 2004. He was archivist at the...
rated Wikipedia as "the best general resource" for military history research, and stated that "the results are largely accurate and generally free of bias." When rating WP as the No. 1 military site he mentioned that "Wikipedia is often criticised for its inaccuracy and bias, but in my experience the military history articles are spot on."
In July 2008, The Economist
The Economist
The Economist is an English-language weekly news and international affairs publication owned by The Economist Newspaper Ltd. and edited in offices in the City of Westminster, London, England. Continuous publication began under founder James Wilson in September 1843...
magazine described Wikipedia as "a user-generated reference service" and noted that Wikipedia's "elaborate moderation rules put a limit to acrimony" generated by cyber-nationalism.
Andrew Orlowski
Andrew Orlowski
Andrew Orlowski is a British columnist for the online IT news and opinion website The Register.-Early career:In 1992, Orlowski started an alternative newspaper in Manchester, England called Badpress. He has also written for Private Eye magazine...
, a columnist for The Register
The Register
The Register is a British technology news and opinion website. It was founded by John Lettice, Mike Magee and Ross Alderson in 1994 as a newsletter called "Chip Connection", initially as an email service...
, expressed similar criticisms, writing that the use of the term "encyclopedia" to describe Wikipedia may lead users into believing it is more reliable than it may be.
Jimmy Wales
Jimmy Wales
Jimmy Donal "Jimbo" Wales is an American Internet entrepreneur best known as a co-founder and promoter of the online non-profit encyclopedia Wikipedia and the Wikia company....
, the de facto
De facto
De facto is a Latin expression that means "concerning fact." In law, it often means "in practice but not necessarily ordained by law" or "in practice or actuality, but not officially established." It is commonly used in contrast to de jure when referring to matters of law, governance, or...
leader of Wikipedia, stresses that encyclopedias of any type are not usually appropriate as primary sources, and should not be relied upon as being authoritative.
Information loop
Criticism and concerns have been expressed about other sources (such as newspapers) which silently use Wikipedia as a reference source. The danger is that if the original information in Wikipedia was false, the fact that it has been reported in other media means that there is now a reliable source to reference the false information in Wikipedia, giving it apparent respectability. This in turn increases the likelihood of the false information being reported in other media. A known example is the Sacha Baron CohenSacha Baron Cohen
Sacha Noam Baron Cohen is an English stand-up comedian, actor, writer, and voice artist. He is most widely known for his portrayal of three unorthodox fictional characters: Ali G, Borat, and Brüno...
article, where false information added in Wikipedia was apparently used by two newspapers, leading to it being treated as reliable in Wikipedia. This process of creating reliable sources for false facts has been termed "Citogenesis" by webcomic artist Randall Munroe
Randall Munroe
Randall Patrick Munroe is an American webcomic author and former NASA roboticist as well as a programmer, best known as the creator of the webcomic xkcd...
.
Removal of false information
Fernanda Viégas of the MIT Media Lab and Martin Wattenberg and Kushal Dave of IBM Research studied the flow of editing in the Wikipedia model, with emphasis on breaks in flow (from vandalism or substantial rewrites), showing the dynamic flow of material over time. From a sample of vandalism edits on the English Wikipedia during May 2003, they found that most such acts were repaired within minutes, summarizing:They also stated that "it is essentially impossible to find a crisp definition of vandalism".
Lih (2004) compared articles before and after they were mentioned in the press, and found that externally referenced articles are of higher quality work.
An informal assessment by the popular IT magazine PC Pro for its 2007 article "Wikipedia Uncovered" tested Wikipedia by introducing 10 errors that "varied between bleeding obvious and deftly subtle" into articles (the researchers later corrected the articles they had edited). Labeling the results "impressive" it noted that all but one was noted and fixed within the hour, and that "the Wikipedians' tools and know-how were just too much for our team." A second series of another 10 tests, using "far more subtle errors" and additional techniques to conceal their nature, met similar results: "despite our stealth attempts the vast majority... were discovered remarkably quickly... the ridiculously minor Jesse James error was corrected within a minute and a very slight change to Queen Anne's entry was put right within two minutes." Two of the latter series were not detected. The article concluded that "Wikipedia corrects the vast majority of errors within minutes, but if they're not spotted within the first day the chances... dwindle as you're then relying on someone to spot the errors while reading the article rather than reviewing the edits."
A study in late-2007 systematically inserted inaccuracies into Wikipedia entries about the lives of philosophers. Depending on how exactly the data are interpreted, either one third or one half of the inaccuracies were corrected within 48 hours.
A 2007 peer-reviewed study that measured the actual number of page views with "damaged" content, concluded:
42% of damage is repaired almost immediately, i.e., before it can confuse, offend, or mislead anyone. Nonetheless, there are still hundreds of millions of damaged views.
Individual bias and the WikiScanner tool
In August 2007, WikiScanner, a tool developed by Virgil GriffithVirgil Griffith
Virgil Griffith , also known as Romanpoet, is an American hacker, known for his involvement in a 2003 lawsuit with Blackboard Inc. and his creation of WikiScanner. He has published papers on artificial life and is currently a graduate student at the California Institute of Technology...
of the California Institute of Technology, was released to match anonymous IP edits in the encyclopedia with an extensive database of addresses. News stories appeared about IP addresses from various organizations such as the Central Intelligence Agency
Central Intelligence Agency
The Central Intelligence Agency is a civilian intelligence agency of the United States government. It is an executive agency and reports directly to the Director of National Intelligence, responsible for providing national security intelligence assessment to senior United States policymakers...
, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee
Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee
The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee is the Democratic Hill committee for the United States House of Representatives, working to elect Democrats to that body. They play a critical role in recruiting candidates, raising funds, and organizing races in districts that are expected to yield...
, Diebold, Inc.
Diebold
Diebold, Inc. is a United States-based security systems corporation that is engaged primarily in the sale, manufacture, installation and service of self-service transaction systems , electronic and physical security products , and software and integrated systems for global financial and...
and the Australian government
Government of Australia
The Commonwealth of Australia is a federal constitutional monarchy under a parliamentary democracy. The Commonwealth of Australia was formed in 1901 as a result of an agreement among six self-governing British colonies, which became the six states...
being used to make edits to Wikipedia articles, sometimes of an opinionated or questionable nature. The BBC
BBC
The British Broadcasting Corporation is a British public service broadcaster. Its headquarters is at Broadcasting House in the City of Westminster, London. It is the largest broadcaster in the world, with about 23,000 staff...
quoted a Wikimedia spokesperson as praising the tool: "We really value transparency and the scanner really takes this to another level. Wikipedia Scanner may prevent an organization or individuals from editing articles that they're really not supposed to."
The WikiScanner story was also covered by The Independent
The Independent
The Independent is a British national morning newspaper published in London by Independent Print Limited, owned by Alexander Lebedev since 2010. It is nicknamed the Indy, while the Sunday edition, The Independent on Sunday, is the Sindy. Launched in 1986, it is one of the youngest UK national daily...
, which stated that many "censorial interventions" by editors with vested interests on a variety of articles in Wikipedia had been discovered:
Not everyone hailed WikiScanner as a success for Wikipedia. Oliver Kamm
Oliver Kamm
Oliver Kamm is a British writer and journalist. He wrote Anti-Totalitarianism: The Left-wing Case for a Neoconservative Foreign Policy , an advocacy of interventionism in foreign policy....
, in a column for The Times
The Times
The Times is a British daily national newspaper, first published in London in 1785 under the title The Daily Universal Register . The Times and its sister paper The Sunday Times are published by Times Newspapers Limited, a subsidiary since 1981 of News International...
, argued instead that:
The WikiScanner is thus an important development in bringing down a pernicious influence on our intellectual life. Critics of the web decry the medium as the cult of the amateur. Wikipedia is worse than that; it is the province of the covert lobby. The most constructive course is to stand on the sidelines and jeer at its pretensions.
WikiScanner only reveals conflicts of interest when the editor does not have a Wikipedia account and their IP address is used instead. Conflict of interest editing done by editors with accounts is not detected, since those edits are anonymous to everyone – except for a handful of privileged Wikipedia admins.
Coverage
Wikipedia has been accused of systemic biasSystemic bias
Systemic bias is the inherent tendency of a process to favor particular outcomes. The term is a neologism that generally refers to human systems; the analogous problem in non-human systems is often called systematic bias, and leads to systematic error in measurements or estimates.-Bias in...
, which is to say its general nature leads, without necessarily any conscious intention, to the propagation of various prejudices. Although many articles in newspapers have concentrated on minor, indeed trivial, factual errors in Wikipedia articles, there are also concerns about large scale, presumably unintentional effects from the increasing influence and use of Wikipedia as a research tool at all levels. In an article in the Times Higher Education magazine (London) philosopher Martin Cohen frames Wikipedia of having "become a monopoly" with "all the prejudices and ignorance of its creators", which he describes as a "youthful cab-drivers" perspective. Cohen's argument, however, finds a grave conclusion in these circumstances: "To control the reference sources that people use is to control the way people comprehend the world. Wikipedia may have a benign, even trivial face, but underneath may lie a more sinister and subtle threat to freedom of thought." That freedom is undermined by what he sees as what matters on Wikipedia, "not your sources but the 'support of the community'."
Critics also point to the tendency to cover topics in a detail disproportionate to their importance. For example, Stephen Colbert
Stephen Colbert
Stephen Tyrone Colbert is an American political satirist, writer, comedian, television host, and actor. He is the host of Comedy Central's The Colbert Report, a satirical news show in which Colbert portrays a caricatured version of conservative political pundits.Colbert originally studied to be an...
once mockingly praised Wikipedia for having a "longer entry on 'lightsaber
Lightsaber
A lightsaber is a fictional weapon in the Star Wars universe, a "laser sword." It consists of a polished metal hilt which projects a blade of light about 1.33 metres long. The lightsaber is the signature weapon of the Jedi order and their Sith counterparts, both of whom can use them for close...
s' than it does on the 'printing press
Printing press
A printing press is a device for applying pressure to an inked surface resting upon a print medium , thereby transferring the ink...
'." In an interview with The Guardian, Dale Hoiberg, the editor-in-chief of Encyclopædia Britannica
Encyclopædia Britannica
The Encyclopædia Britannica , published by Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., is a general knowledge English-language encyclopaedia that is available in print, as a DVD, and on the Internet. It is written and continuously updated by about 100 full-time editors and more than 4,000 expert...
, noted:
People write of things they're interested in, and so many subjects don't get covered; and news events get covered in great detail. In the past, the entry on Hurricane FrancesHurricane FrancesHurricane Frances was the sixth named storm, the fourth hurricane, and the third major hurricane of the 2004 Atlantic hurricane season. The system crossing the open Atlantic during mid to late August, moving to the north of the Lesser Antilles while strengthening. Its outer bands affected Puerto...
was more than five times the length of that on Chinese artChinese artChinese art is visual art that, whether ancient or modern, originated in or is practiced in China or by Chinese artists or performers. Early so-called "stone age art" dates back to 10,000 BC, mostly consisting of simple pottery and sculptures. This early period was followed by a series of art...
, and the entry on Coronation StreetCoronation StreetCoronation Street is a British soap opera set in Weatherfield, a fictional town in Greater Manchester based on Salford. Created by Tony Warren, Coronation Street was first broadcast on 9 December 1960...
was twice as long as the article on Tony BlairTony BlairAnthony Charles Lynton Blair is a former British Labour Party politician who served as the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 2 May 1997 to 27 June 2007. He was the Member of Parliament for Sedgefield from 1983 to 2007 and Leader of the Labour Party from 1994 to 2007...
.
This critical approach has been satirised as "Wikigroaning", a term coined by Jon Hendren of the website Something Awful
Something Awful
Something Awful, often abbreviated to SA, is a comedy website housing a variety of content, including blog entries, forums, feature articles, digitally edited pictures, and humorous media reviews. It was created by Richard "Lowtax" Kyanka in 1999 as a largely personal website, but as it grew, so...
. In the game, two articles (preferably with similar names) are compared: one about an acknowledged serious or classical subject and the other about a topic popular or current. Defenders of a broad inclusion criteria have held that the encyclopedia's coverage of pop culture does not impose space constraints on the coverage of more serious subjects (see "Wiki is not paper"). As Ivor Tossell noted:
That Wikipedia is chock full of useless arcana (and did you know, by the way, that the article on "Debate" is shorter than the piece that weighs the relative merits of the 1978 and 2003 versions of Battlestar Galactica?) isn't a knock against it: Since it can grow infinitely, the silly articles aren't depriving the serious ones of space.
Wikipedia has been accused of deficiencies in comprehensiveness because of its voluntary nature, and of reflecting the systemic biases of its contributors. Former Nupedia editor-in-chief Larry Sanger
Larry Sanger
Lawrence Mark "Larry" Sanger is an American philosopher, co-founder of Wikipedia, and the founder of Citizendium....
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." In a GamesRadar
GamesRadar
GamesRadar is a multi-format video game website featuring regular news, previews, reviews, videos, and guides. It is owned and operated simultaneously in the UK and US by worldwide publisher Future Publishing...
editorial, columnist Charlie Barrat juxtaposed Wikipedia's coverage of video game-related topics with its smaller content about topics that have greater real-world significance, such as God, World War II and former U.S. presidents.
Wikipedia has been praised for making it possible for articles to be updated or created in response to current events. For example, the then-new article on the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake
2004 Indian Ocean earthquake
The 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake was an undersea megathrust earthquake that occurred at 00:58:53 UTC on Sunday, December 26, 2004, with an epicentre off the west coast of Sumatra, Indonesia. The quake itself is known by the scientific community as the Sumatra-Andaman earthquake...
in its English edition was cited often by the press shortly after the incident. Its editors have also argued that, as a website, Wikipedia is able to include articles on a greater number of subjects than print encyclopedias may.
Notability of article topics
Wikipedia's notability
Notability in Wikipedia
Notability is a term used within the English version of the online encyclopedia Wikipedia. It is as an editorial metric used to determine topics meriting a dedicated encyclopedia article...
guidelines, and the application thereof, are the subject of much criticism. Nicholson Baker
Nicholson Baker
Nicholson Baker is a contemporary American writer of fiction and non-fiction. As a novelist, he often focuses on minute inspection of his characters' and narrators' stream of consciousness, and has written about such provocative topics as voyeurism and planned assassination...
considers the notability standards arbitrary and essentially unsolvable:
There are quires, reams, bales of controversy over what constitutes notability in Wikipedia: nobody will ever sort it out.
Criticizing the "deletionists", Nicholson Baker then writes:
Still, a lot of good work—verifiable, informative, brain-leapingly strange—is being cast out of this paperless, infinitely expandable accordion folder by people who have a narrow, almost grade-schoolish notion of what sort of curiosity an on-line encyclopedia will be able to satisfy in the years to come.
[...] It's harder to improve something that's already written, or to write something altogether new, especially now that so many of the World Book–sanctioned encyclopedic fruits are long plucked. There are some people on Wikipedia now who are just bullies, who take pleasure in wrecking and mocking peoples' work—even to the point of laughing at nonstandard "EngrishEngrishrefers to unusual forms of English language usage by native speakers of some East Asian languages. The term itself relates to Japanese speakers' tendency to inadvertently substitute the English phonemes "R" and "L" for one another, because the Japanese language has one alveolar consonant in place...
." They poke articles full of warnings and citation-needed notes and deletion prods till the topics go away.
Yet another criticism about the deletionists is this: "The increasing difficulty of making a successful edit; the exclusion of casual users; slower growth – all are hallmarks of the deletionists approach."
Complaining that his own biography was on the verge of deletion for lack of notability, Timothy Noah
Timothy Noah
Timothy Robert Noah is an American journalist. He is a senior editor of The New Republic, where he writes the TRB column and a political blog...
argued that:
Wikipedia's notability policy resembles U.S. immigration policy before 9/11: stringent rules, spotty enforcement. To be notable, a Wikipedia topic must be "the subject of multiple, non-trivial published works from sources that are reliable and independent of the subject and of each other." Although I have written or been quoted in such works, I can't say I've ever been the subject of any. And wouldn't you know, some notability cop cruised past my bio and pulled me over. Unless I get notable in a hurry—win the Nobel Peace Prize? Prove I sired Anna Nicole Smith's baby daughter?—a "sysop" (volunteer techie) will wipe my Wikipedia page clean. It's straight out of Philip K. DickPhilip K. DickPhilip Kindred Dick was an American novelist, short story writer and essayist whose published work is almost entirely in the science fiction genre. Dick explored sociological, political and metaphysical themes in novels dominated by monopolistic corporations, authoritarian governments and altered...
.
In the same article, Noah mentions that the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Stacy Schiff
Stacy Schiff
Stacy Madeleine Schiff is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American nonfiction author and guest columnist for The New York Times.-Biography:...
was not considered notable enough for a Wikipedia entry before she wrote an extensive New Yorker
The New Yorker
The New Yorker is an American magazine of reportage, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons and poetry published by Condé Nast...
article on Wikipedia itself.
Liberal bias
Another criticism is that a politically liberal bias is predominant. According to Jimmy Wales
Jimmy Wales
Jimmy Donal "Jimbo" Wales is an American Internet entrepreneur best known as a co-founder and promoter of the online non-profit encyclopedia Wikipedia and the Wikia company....
: "The Wikipedia community is very diverse, from liberal
Liberalism
Liberalism is the belief in the importance of liberty and equal rights. Liberals espouse a wide array of views depending on their understanding of these principles, but generally, liberals support ideas such as constitutionalism, liberal democracy, free and fair elections, human rights,...
to conservative
Conservatism
Conservatism is a political and social philosophy that promotes the maintenance of traditional institutions and supports, at the most, minimal and gradual change in society. Some conservatives seek to preserve things as they are, emphasizing stability and continuity, while others oppose modernism...
to libertarian
Libertarianism
Libertarianism, in the strictest sense, is the political philosophy that holds individual liberty as the basic moral principle of society. In the broadest sense, it is any political philosophy which approximates this view...
and beyond. If averages mattered, and due to the nature of the wiki software (no voting) they almost certainly don't, I would say that the Wikipedia community is slightly more liberal than the U.S. population on average, because we are global and the international community of English speakers is slightly more liberal than the U.S. population. There are no data or surveys to back that." Andrew Schlafly created Conservapedia
Conservapedia
Conservapedia is an English-language wiki project written from a self-described American conservative Christian point of view. The website considers itself to be a supporter of "conservative, family-friendly" content...
because of his perception that Wikipedia contained a liberal bias. Conservapedia's editors have compiled a list of alleged examples of liberal bias in Wikipedia. In 2007, an article in The Christian Post
The Christian Post
The Christian Post is a pan-denominational, Evangelical Christian newspaper based in Washington, D.C..Launched initially as an online publication, the newspaper was founded in 2000 to deliver news, information, and commentaries relevant to Christians across denominational lines and to bring greater...
criticised Wikipedia's coverage of intelligent design
Intelligent design
Intelligent design is the proposition that "certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection." It is a form of creationism and a contemporary adaptation of the traditional teleological argument for...
, saying that it was biased and hypocritical. Lawrence Solomon
Lawrence Solomon
Lawrence Solomon is a Canadian writer on the environment and the founder and executive director of Energy Probe, a Canadian non-governmental environmental organization...
of the National Review
National Review
National Review is a biweekly magazine founded by the late author William F. Buckley, Jr., in 1955 and based in New York City. It describes itself as "America's most widely read and influential magazine and web site for conservative news, commentary, and opinion."Although the print version of the...
stated that Wikipedia articles on subjects like global warming
Global warming
Global warming refers to the rising average temperature of Earth's atmosphere and oceans and its projected continuation. In the last 100 years, Earth's average surface temperature increased by about with about two thirds of the increase occurring over just the last three decades...
, intelligent design, and Roe v. Wade
Roe v. Wade
Roe v. Wade, , was a controversial landmark decision by the United States Supreme Court on the issue of abortion. The Court decided that a right to privacy under the due process clause in the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution extends to a woman's decision to have an abortion,...
are slanted in favor of liberal views.
In a September 2010 issue of the conservative weekly Human Events
Human Events
Human Events is a weekly American conservative magazine. It takes its name from the first sentence of the United States Declaration of Independence...
, Rowan Scarborough
Rowan Scarborough
Rowan Scarborough was formerly a Washington Times reporter for nearly two decades who wrote a weekly column with fellow reporter Bill Gertz called "Inside the Ring." In February 2007, he joined the Washington Examiner as its national security correspondent...
presented a critique of Wikipedia's coverage of American politicians prominent in the approaching midterm elections as evidence of systemic liberal bias. Scarborough compares the biographical articles of liberal and conservative opponents in Senate races in the Alaska Republican primary and the Delaware and Nevada general election, emphasizing the quantity of negative coverage of tea party
Tea Party movement
The Tea Party movement is an American populist political movement that is generally recognized as conservative and libertarian, and has sponsored protests and supported political candidates since 2009...
-endorsed candidates. He also cites some criticism by Lawrence Solomon and quotes in full the lead section of Wikipedia's article on the competing Conservapedia
Conservapedia
Conservapedia is an English-language wiki project written from a self-described American conservative Christian point of view. The website considers itself to be a supporter of "conservative, family-friendly" content...
as evidence of an underlying bias.
American and corporate bias
Tim Anderson, a senior lecturer in political economy
Political economy
Political economy originally was the term for studying production, buying, and selling, and their relations with law, custom, and government, as well as with the distribution of national income and wealth, including through the budget process. Political economy originated in moral philosophy...
at the University of Sydney
University of Sydney
The University of Sydney is a public university located in Sydney, New South Wales. The main campus spreads across the suburbs of Camperdown and Darlington on the southwestern outskirts of the Sydney CBD. Founded in 1850, it is the oldest university in Australia and Oceania...
, said that Wikipedia administrators display a U.S.-oriented bias in their interaction with editors, and in their determination of sources that are appropriate for use on the site. Anderson was outraged after several of the sources he used in his edits to Hugo Chávez
Hugo Chávez
Hugo Rafael Chávez Frías is the 56th and current President of Venezuela, having held that position since 1999. He was formerly the leader of the Fifth Republic Movement political party from its foundation in 1997 until 2007, when he became the leader of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela...
, including Venezuela Analysis and Z Magazine, were disallowed as "unusable". Anderson also described Wikipedia's neutral point of view policy to ZDNet Australia as "a facade", and that Wikipedia "hides behind a reliance on corporate media editorials".
Gender bias
Justine Cassell
Justine Cassell
Justine Cassell is an American professor and researcher interested in human-human conversation, human-computer interaction, and storytelling. Since August 2010 she has been the director of the Carnegie Mellon Human Computer Interaction Institute .-Career:Justine Cassell was born in New York City...
, a professor and the director of the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, has criticized Wikipedia for lacking not only women contributors but also extensive and in-depth encyclopedic attention to many topics regarding gender. An article in The New York Times cites a Wikimedia Foundation study which found that fewer than 13% of contributors to Wikipedia are women. Sue Gardner
Sue Gardner
Sue Gardner is the current Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation in San Francisco, and previous director of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's website and online news outlets.- Life and journalism career :...
, the executive director of the foundation, said increasing diversity was about making the encyclopedia "as good as it could be." Factors the article cited as possibly discouraging women from editing included the "obsessive fact-loving realm," associations with the "hard-driving hacker crowd," and the necessity to be "open to very difficult, high-conflict people, even misogynists."
Reliability as a source in other contexts
Although Wikipedia is stated not to be a primary source, it has been used as evidence in legal cases. In one notable case, the trademark of Formula OneFormula One
Formula One, also known as Formula 1 or F1 and referred to officially as the FIA Formula One World Championship, is the highest class of single seater auto racing sanctioned by the Fédération Internationale de l'Automobile . The "formula" designation in the name refers to a set of rules with which...
racing decision, the UK Intellectual Property Office considered both the reliability of Wikipedia, and its usefulness as a reliable source of evidence:
In the United States, the United States Court of Federal Claims
United States Court of Federal Claims
The United States Court of Federal Claims is a United States federal court that hears monetary claims against the U.S. government. The court is established pursuant to Congress's authority under Article One of the United States Constitution...
has ruled that "Wikipedia may not be a reliable source of information." and "...Articles [from Wikipedia] do not - at least on their face - remotely meet this reliability requirement...A review of the Wikipedia website reveals a pervasive and, for our purposes, disturbing series of disclaimers..."
Wikipedia has also developed into a key source for some current new events such as the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake
2004 Indian Ocean earthquake
The 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake was an undersea megathrust earthquake that occurred at 00:58:53 UTC on Sunday, December 26, 2004, with an epicentre off the west coast of Sumatra, Indonesia. The quake itself is known by the scientific community as the Sumatra-Andaman earthquake...
and related tsunami
Tsunami
A tsunami is a series of water waves caused by the displacement of a large volume of a body of water, typically an ocean or a large lake...
, and the 2007 Virginia Tech massacre
Virginia Tech massacre
The Virginia Tech massacre was a school shooting that took place on April 16, 2007, on the campus of Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in Blacksburg, Virginia, United States. In two separate attacks, approximately two hours apart, the perpetrator, Seung-Hui Cho, killed 32 people...
. In the latter case, it cites the New York Times, noting with 750,000 page views of the article in the two days after the event:
The Washington Post commented similarly, in the context of 2008 Presidential election candidate biographies, that despite occasional brief vandalism, "it's hard to find a more up-to-date, detailed, thorough article on Obama
Barack Obama
Barack Hussein Obama II is the 44th and current President of the United States. He is the first African American to hold the office. Obama previously served as a United States Senator from Illinois, from January 2005 until he resigned following his victory in the 2008 presidential election.Born in...
than Wikipedia's. As of Friday (14 September 2007), Obama's article – more than 22 pages long, with 15 sections covering his personal and professional life – had a reference list of 167 sources."
Broad assessments
Several commentators have drawn a middle ground, asserting that the project contains much valuable knowledge and has some reliability, even if the degree is not yet assessed with certainty. Many of the librarian and academic reviewers of Wikipedia cited above take such a view.Others taking this view include Danah Boyd
Danah Boyd
danah boyd also known as Danah Michele Boyd, is an American social media researcher known for her public commentary on the use of social networking sites by youth...
, who in 2005 discussed Wikipedia as an academic source, concluding that "[i]t will never be an encyclopedia, but it will contain extensive knowledge that is quite valuable for different purposes", and Bill Thompson
Bill Thompson (technology writer)
Bill Thompson is an English technology writer, best known for his weekly column in the Technology section of BBC News Online and his appearances on Click, a radio show on the BBC World Service. He is also an Honorary Senior Visiting Fellow at City University London .Born in Jarrow, Thompson grew...
who stated "I use the Wikipedia a lot. It is a good starting point for serious research, but I would never accept something that I read there without checking."
Information Today's March 2006 article concludes on a similar theme:
Dan Gillmor
Dan Gillmor
Dan Gillmor is a noted American technology writer and columnist. He is director of the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship at Arizona State University's Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication and a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard...
, a Silicon Valley
Silicon Valley
Silicon Valley is a term which refers to the southern part of the San Francisco Bay Area in Northern California in the United States. The region is home to many of the world's largest technology corporations...
commentator and author commented in October 2004 that, "I don't think anyone is saying Wikipedia is an absolute replacement for a traditional encyclopedia. But in the topics I know something about, I've found Wikipedia to be as accurate as any other source I've found."
Referencing Linus' Law of open-source development, Larry Sanger who is a co-founder of Wikipedia, stated on Kuro5hin
Kuro5hin
Kuro5hin is a collaborative discussion website. Articles are created and submitted by Kuro5hin's users and submitted to queue for evaluation. Site members can vote for or against publishing an article and, once the article has reached a certain number of votes, it is then published to the site...
in 2001 that "Given enough eyeballs, all errors are shallow."
Sheizaf Rafaeli
Sheizaf Rafaeli
Sheizaf Rafaeli , is an Israeli researcher, scholar of Computer-mediated communication, computer scientist, and newspaper columnist. He is Professor and Dean at the School of Management , Israel and additionally Director of and the...
and Yaron Ariel report how "most people agree that at least the English version of Wikipedia is approaching critical mass where substantial content disasters should become rare."
Likewise, technology figure Joi Ito
Joi Ito
is a Japanese activist, entrepreneur, venture capitalist and Director of the MIT Media Lab.Ito has received recognition for his role as an entrepreneur focused on Internet and technology companies and has founded, among other companies, PSINet Japan, Digital Garage and Infoseek Japan. He maintains...
wrote on Wikipedia's authority, "[a]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."
Loc Vu-Quoc, professor for Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the University of Florida
University of Florida
The University of Florida is an American public land-grant, sea-grant, and space-grant research university located on a campus in Gainesville, Florida. The university traces its historical origins to 1853, and has operated continuously on its present Gainesville campus since September 1906...
, has stated that "sometimes errors may go for years without being corrected as experts don't usually read Wikipedia articles in their own field to correct these errors".
In a letter to the editor of Physics Today
Physics Today
Physics Today, created in 1948, is the membership journal of the American Institute of Physics. It is provided to 130,000 members of twelve physics societies, including the American Physical Society...
, Gregg Jaeger, an associate professor at Boston University
Boston University
Boston University is a private research university located in Boston, Massachusetts. With more than 4,000 faculty members and more than 31,000 students, Boston University is one of the largest private universities in the United States and one of Boston's largest employers...
, has characterized Wikipedia as a medium that is susceptible to fostering "anarchy and distortions" in relation to scientific information. The letter was in response to a review of his book Quantum Information: An Overview, that had questioned "whether there is an audience for such encyclopedic texts, especially given the easy access to online sources of information such as the arXiv
ArXiv
The arXiv |Chi]], χ) is an archive for electronic preprints of scientific papers in the fields of mathematics, physics, astronomy, computer science, quantitative biology, statistics, and quantitative finance which can be accessed online. In many fields of mathematics and physics, almost all...
e-print server and Wikipedia."
People known to use or recommend Wikipedia as a reference source include film critic Roger Ebert
Roger Ebert
Roger Joseph Ebert is an American film critic and screenwriter. He is the first film critic to win a Pulitzer Prize for Criticism.Ebert is known for his film review column and for the television programs Sneak Previews, At the Movies with Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert, and Siskel and Ebert and The...
, comedian Rosie O'Donnell
Rosie O'Donnell
Roseann "Rosie" O'Donnell is an American stand-up comedian, actress, author and television personality. She has also been a magazine editor and continues to be a celebrity blogger, LGBT rights activist, television producer and collaborative partner in the LGBT family vacation company R Family...
, University of Maryland
University of Maryland
When the term "University of Maryland" is used without any qualification, it generally refers to the University of Maryland, College Park.University of Maryland may refer to the following:...
physicist
Physicist
A physicist is a scientist who studies or practices physics. Physicists study a wide range of physical phenomena in many branches of physics spanning all length scales: from sub-atomic particles of which all ordinary matter is made to the behavior of the material Universe as a whole...
Robert L. Park
Robert L. Park
Robert Lee Park , also known as Bob Park, is an emeritus professor of physics at the University of Maryland, College Park and a former Director of Public Information at the Washington office of the American Physical Society...
and Rutgers University
Rutgers University
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey , is the largest institution for higher education in New Jersey, United States. It was originally chartered as Queen's College in 1766. It is the eighth-oldest college in the United States and one of the nine Colonial colleges founded before the American...
sociology professor Ted Goertzel.
Tools for testing the reliability of articles
While experienced editors can view the article history and discussion page, for normal users it is not so easy to check whether information from Wikipedia is reliable. University projects from California, Switzerland and Germany try to improve that by methods of formal analysis and data mining. Wiki-WatchWiki-Watch
Wiki-Watch is a German University project for transparency of Wikipedia and Wikipedia articles, aimed especially at media professionals.Wiki-Watch is a free software application . This tool automatically assesses the reliability of Wikipedia articles in English and German. It produces a five-level...
from Germany, which was inspired by the WikiBu
Wikibu
Wikibu is a free software tool to assess the reliability of German Wikipedia articles. It was originally designed for use in schools to improve information literacy....
from Switzerland, shows an evaluation up to five-stars for every English or German article in Wikipedia. Part of this rating is the Californian tool WikiTrust
WikiTrust
WikiTrust is a software product that assesses the credibility of content and author reputation of wiki articles using an automated algorithm. WikiTrust is a plug-in for servers using the MediaWiki platform, such as Wikipedia. When installed on a MediaWiki website it enables users of that website to...
which shows the trustworthiness of single text parts of Wikipedia articles by white (trustworthy) or orange (not trustworthy) markings.
False biographical information
Inaccurate information may persist in Wikipedia for a long time before it is challenged. The most prominent cases reported by mainstream media involved biographies of living persons.The Seigenthaler incident demonstrated that the subject of a biographical article must sometimes fix blatant lies about his own life. In May 2005, a user edited the biographical
Biography
A biography is a detailed description or account of someone's life. More than a list of basic facts , biography also portrays the subject's experience of those events...
article on John Seigenthaler Sr. so that it contained several false and defamatory statements. The inaccurate claims went unnoticed between May and September 2005 when they were discovered by Victor S. Johnson, Jr.
Victor S. Johnson, Jr.
Victor Samuel Johnson, Jr. was an American lawyer who was president of Aladdin Industries, a manufacturer of vacuum bottles, kerosene lamps, and stoves. He was notable for creating the market for decorative lunch boxes. The company was further diversified under Johnson's leadership...
, a friend of Seigenthaler. Wikipedia content is often mirrored at sites such as Answers.com
Answers.com
Answers.com is an Internet-based knowledge exchange, which includes WikiAnswers, ReferenceAnswers, VideoAnswers, and five international language Q&A communities. The Answers.com domain name was purchased by Bill Gross and Henrik Jones at idealab in 1996. The domain name was acquired by NetShepard...
, which means that incorrect information can be replicated alongside correct information through a number of web sources. Such information can develop a misleading air of authority because of its presence at such sites:
Seth Finkelstein reported in an article in The Guardian
The Guardian
The Guardian, formerly known as The Manchester Guardian , is a British national daily newspaper in the Berliner format...
on his efforts to remove his own biography page from Wikipedia, simply because it was subjected to defamation:
In the same article Finkelstein recounts how he voted his own biography as "not notable
Notability in Wikipedia
Notability is a term used within the English version of the online encyclopedia Wikipedia. It is as an editorial metric used to determine topics meriting a dedicated encyclopedia article...
enough" in order to have it removed from Wikipedia. He goes on to recount a similar story involving Angela Beesley, previously a prominent member of the foundation which runs Wikipedia.
In November 2005, the biography of Jens Stoltenberg
Jens Stoltenberg
is a Norwegian politician, leader of the Norwegian Labour Party and the current Prime Minister of Norway. Having assumed office on 17 October 2005, Stoltenberg previously served as Prime Minister from 2000 to 2001....
, the Norwegian Prime Minister, was edited to contain libelous statements including accusations of pedophilia and prison time.
Taner Akcam
Taner Akçam
Altuğ Taner Akçam is a Turkish historian and sociologist. He is one of the first Turkish academics to acknowledge and openly discuss the Armenian Genocide, and is recognized as a "leading international authority" on the subject....
, a Turkish
Turkish people
Turkish people, also known as the "Turks" , are an ethnic group primarily living in Turkey and in the former lands of the Ottoman Empire where Turkish minorities had been established in Bulgaria, Cyprus, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Georgia, Greece, Kosovo, Macedonia, and Romania...
history professor at the University of Minnesota
University of Minnesota
The University of Minnesota, Twin Cities is a public research university located in Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota, United States. It is the oldest and largest part of the University of Minnesota system and has the fourth-largest main campus student body in the United States, with 52,557...
, was detained at the Montreal airport, as his article was vandalized by Turkish nationalists in 2007. While this mistake was resolved, he was again arrested in USA for the same suspicion two days later.
In another example, on March 2, 2007, msnbc.com reported that Hillary Rodham Clinton
Hillary Rodham Clinton
Hillary Diane Rodham Clinton is the 67th United States Secretary of State, serving in the administration of President Barack Obama. She was a United States Senator for New York from 2001 to 2009. As the wife of the 42nd President of the United States, Bill Clinton, she was the First Lady of the...
had been incorrectly listed for 20 months in her Wikipedia biography as valedictorian
Valedictorian
Valedictorian is an academic title conferred upon the student who delivers the closing or farewell statement at a graduation ceremony. Usually, the valedictorian is the highest ranked student among those graduating from an educational institution...
of her class of 1969 at Wellesley College. (Hillary Rodham was not the valedictorian, though she did speak at commencement
Graduation
Graduation is the action of receiving or conferring an academic degree or the ceremony that is sometimes associated, where students become Graduates. Before the graduation, candidates are referred to as Graduands. The date of graduation is often called degree day. The graduation itself is also...
.) The article included a link to the Wikipedia edit, where the incorrect information was added on July 9, 2005. After the msnbc.com report, the inaccurate information was removed the same day. Between the two edits, the wrong information had stayed in the Clinton article while it was edited more than 4,800 times over 20 months.
Attempts to perpetrate hoax
Hoax
A hoax is a deliberately fabricated falsehood made to masquerade as truth. It is distinguishable from errors in observation or judgment, or rumors, urban legends, pseudosciences or April Fools' Day events that are passed along in good faith by believers or as jokes.-Definition:The British...
es may not be confined to editing Wikipedia articles. In October 2005 Alan Mcilwraith
Alan Mcilwraith
Alan Mcilwraith is a former call centre worker from Glasgow, Scotland who was exposed by a tabloid newspaper after passing himself off as a much-decorated British Army officer....
, a former call centre
Call centre
A call centre or call center is a centralised office used for the purpose of receiving and transmitting a large volume of requests by telephone. A call centre is operated by a company to administer incoming product support or information inquiries from consumers. Outgoing calls for telemarketing,...
worker from Scotland
Scotland
Scotland is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. Occupying the northern third of the island of Great Britain, it shares a border with England to the south and is bounded by the North Sea to the east, the Atlantic Ocean to the north and west, and the North Channel and Irish Sea to the...
created a Wikipedia article in which he claimed to be a highly decorated war hero. The article was quickly identified by other users as unreliable (see Wikipedia Signpost article 17 April 2006). However, Mcilwraith had also succeeded in convincing a number of charities and media organizations that he was who he claimed to be:
In May 2010, French politician Ségolène Royal
Ségolène Royal
Marie-Ségolène Royal , known as Ségolène Royal, is a French politician. She is the president of the Poitou-Charentes Regional Council, a former member of the National Assembly, a former government minister, and a prominent member of the French Socialist Party...
publicly praised the memory of Léon-Robert de l'Astran, an 18th century naturalist
Naturalist
Naturalist may refer to:* Practitioner of natural history* Conservationist* Advocate of naturalism * Naturalist , autobiography-See also:* The American Naturalist, periodical* Naturalism...
, humanist
Humanism
Humanism is an approach in study, philosophy, world view or practice that focuses on human values and concerns. In philosophy and social science, humanism is a perspective which affirms some notion of human nature, and is contrasted with anti-humanism....
and son of a slave trader, who had opposed the slave trade. The newspaper Sud-Ouest
Sud-Ouest (newspaper)
Sud-Ouest is the third regional daily in France in terms of circulation. It was created in Bordeaux, on August 29, 1944 by Jacques Lemoine, as a successor to La Petite Gironde. In 1949, the Sunday edition, Sud-Ouest Dimanche was launched. Sud-Ouest covers the Gironde, the Charente, the...
revealed a month later that de l'Astran had never existed—except as the subject of an article in the French Wikipedia
French Wikipedia
The French Wikipedia is the French language edition of Wikipedia, spelt Wikipédia. This edition was started in March 2001, and has about articles as of , making it the third-largest Wikipedia overall, after the English-language and German-language editions...
. Historian Jean-Louis Mahé discovered that de l'Astran was fictional after a student, interested by Royal's praise of him, asked Mahé about him. Mahé's research led him to realise that de l'Astran did not exist in any archives, and he traced the hoax back to the Rotary Club of La Rochelle
La Rochelle
La Rochelle is a city in western France and a seaport on the Bay of Biscay, a part of the Atlantic Ocean. It is the capital of the Charente-Maritime department.The city is connected to the Île de Ré by a bridge completed on 19 May 1988...
. The article, created by members of the Club in January 2007, had thus remained online for three years—unsourced—before the hoax was uncovered. Upon Sud-Ouest’s revelation—repeated in other major French newspapers—French Wikipedia administrator DonCamillo immediately deleted the article.
There have also been instances of users deliberately inserting false information into Wikipedia in order to test the system and demonstrate its alleged unreliability. For example, Gene Weingarten
Gene Weingarten
Gene Weingarten is a two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist known for both his serious and humorous work...
, a journalist, ran such a test in 2007 by anonymously inserting false information into his own biography. The fabrications were removed 27 hours later by a Wikipedia editor who was regularly watching changes to that article. Television personality Stephen Colbert
Stephen Colbert
Stephen Tyrone Colbert is an American political satirist, writer, comedian, television host, and actor. He is the host of Comedy Central's The Colbert Report, a satirical news show in which Colbert portrays a caricatured version of conservative political pundits.Colbert originally studied to be an...
lampooned this drawback of Wikipedia, calling it wikiality.
"Death by Wikipedia" is a phenomenon in which a person is erroneously proclaimed dead through vandalism. Articles about the comedian Paul Reiser
Paul Reiser
Paul Reiser is an American stand-up comedian, actor, television personality, author, screenwriter and musician. He is most widely known for his role on the long-running television sitcom Mad About You.-Early life:...
, British television host Vernon Kay
Vernon Kay
Vernon Charles Kay is a British television presenter, radio DJ, american footballer and former model. He began television presenting on the BBC children's programme FBi, a spin-off of Fully Booked. Since he has presented various programmes, most notably T4, Beat the Star and All Star Family...
, and the West Virginia Senator Robert Byrd
Robert Byrd
Robert Carlyle Byrd was a United States Senator from West Virginia. A member of the Democratic Party, Byrd served as a U.S. Representative from 1953 until 1959 and as a U.S. Senator from 1959 to 2010...
, who died on June 28, 2010, have been vandalized in this way.
Wikipedia considers vandalism as "any addition, removal, or change of content in a deliberate attempt to compromise the integrity of Wikipedia". The Wikipedia page "Researching with Wikipedia" states:
Other false information
In June 2007, an anonymous Wikipedia contributor became involved in the Chris Benoit double murder and suicideChris Benoit double murder and suicide
The Chris Benoit double murder suicide occurred over a three-day period ending on June 24, 2007. World Wrestling Entertainment professional wrestler Chris Benoit killed his wife, Nancy Benoit, strangled his seven-year-old son, Daniel, and subsequently committed suicide by hanging. Autopsy results...
because of an unverified piece of information he added to the Chris Benoit
Chris Benoit
Christopher Michael "Chris" Benoit was a Canadian professional wrestler whose career and life ended in a murder–suicide...
English Wikipedia
English Wikipedia
The English Wikipedia is the English-language edition of the free online encyclopedia Wikipedia. Founded on 15 January 2001 and reaching three million articles by August 2009, it was the first edition of Wikipedia and remains the largest, with almost three times as many articles as the next...
article. This information regarding Benoit's wife's death was added fourteen hours before police discovered the bodies of Benoit and his family. Police detectives seized computer equipment from the man held responsible for the postings, but believed he was uninvolved and did not press charges.
The IP address
IP address
An Internet Protocol address is a numerical label assigned to each device participating in a computer network that uses the Internet Protocol for communication. An IP address serves two principal functions: host or network interface identification and location addressing...
from which the edit was made was traced to earlier instances of Wikipedia vandalism. The contributor apologized on Wikinews
Wikinews
Wikinews is a free-content news source wiki and a project of the Wikimedia Foundation. The site works through collaborative journalism. Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales has distinguished Wikinews from Wikipedia by saying "on Wikinews, each story is to be written as a news story as opposed to an...
, saying:
On 29 August 2008, shortly after the UEFA cup first round draw was completed, an edit was made to AC Omonia
AC Omonia
Athletic Club Omonoia Nicosia is a professional football club that plays in the Cyprus capital city Nicosia. The club was established in 1948 and became a member of the Cyprus Football Association in 1953...
's article, apparently by users of B3ta
B3ta
B3ta is a high-profile British website, described as a "puerile digital arts community" by The Guardian. It was founded in 2001 by Rob Manuel, Denise Wilton and Cal Henderson....
, which added the following erroneous information to the section titled "The fans".
On 18 September 2008, David Anderson, a British journalist writing for the Daily Mirror, quoted this in his match preview ahead of Omonia's game with Manchester City
Manchester City F.C.
Manchester City Football Club is an English Premier League football club based in Manchester. Founded in 1880 as St. Mark's , they became Ardwick Association Football Club in 1887 and Manchester City in 1894...
, which appeared in the web and print versions of the Mirror and the nickname was quoted in subsequent editions on 19 September.
In a 2009 incident, University College Dublin
University College Dublin
University College Dublin ) - formally known as University College Dublin - National University of Ireland, Dublin is the Republic of Ireland's largest, and Ireland's second largest, university, with over 1,300 faculty and 17,000 students...
sociology student Shane Fitzgerald added an incorrect quote to the article on the recently deceased composer Maurice Jarre
Maurice Jarre
Maurice-Alexis Jarre was a French composer and conductor.Although he composed several concert works, he is best known for his film scores, and is particularly known for his collaborations with film director David Lean. Jarre composed the scores to all of Lean's films since Lawrence of Arabia...
. Fitzgerald wanted to demonstrate the potential dangers of news reporters' reliance on the internet for information. Although Fitzgerald's edits were removed three times from Wikipedia article for lack of sourcing, they were nevertheless copied into obituary columns in newspapers worldwide. Fitzgerald believes that if he had not come forward his quote would have remained in history as actual fact.
The death of Norman Wisdom
Norman Wisdom
Sir Norman Joseph Wisdom, OBE was an English actor, comedian and singer-songwriter best known for a series of comedy films produced between 1953 and 1966 featuring his hapless onscreen character Norman Pitkin...
in October 2010 led several major newspapers to repeat the false claim, drawn from Wikipedia, that he was the author of the lyrics of the Second World War song "(There'll Be Bluebirds Over) The White Cliffs of Dover
(There'll Be Bluebirds Over) The White Cliffs of Dover
" The White Cliffs of Dover" is a popular World War II song made famous by Vera Lynn with her 1942 recording—one of her best known recordings. Written in 1941 by Walter Kent and Nat Burton, the song was also among the most popular Second World War tunes...
".
After the 2010 FIFA World Cup
2010 FIFA World Cup
The 2010 FIFA World Cup was the 19th FIFA World Cup, the world championship for men's national association football teams. It took place in South Africa from 11 June to 11 July 2010...
, FIFA president Sepp Blatter
Sepp Blatter
Joseph S. Blatter , commonly known as Sepp Blatter, is a Swiss football administrator, who serves as the 8th and current President of FIFA . He was elected on 8 June 1998, succeeding João Havelange. He was re-elected as President in 2002, 2007, and 2011...
was presented with the Order of the Companions of Oliver Reginald Tambo. The citation, however, read: "The Order of the Companions of OR Tambo in Gold – awarded to Joseph Sepp Bellend Blatter (1936 – ) for his exceptional contribution to the field of football and support for the hosting of the Fifa World Cup on the African continent," after the name on his Wikipedia entry was vandalised.
Political interests and advocacy
While Wikipedia policy requires articles to have a neutral point of view, it is not immune from attempts by outsiders (or insiders) with an agenda to place a spinSpin (public relations)
In public relations, spin is a form of propaganda, achieved through providing an interpretation of an event or campaign to persuade public opinion in favor or against a certain organization or public figure...
on articles. In January 2006 it was revealed that several staffers of members of the U.S. House of Representatives had embarked on a campaign to cleanse their respective bosses' biographies on Wikipedia, as well as inserting negative remarks on political opponents. References to a campaign promise by Martin Meehan
Marty Meehan
Martin Thomas "Marty" Meehan is an American attorney and politician from the state of Massachusetts. He is the current Chancellor of the University of Massachusetts Lowell, a position he assumed on July 1, 2007...
to surrender his seat in 2000 were deleted, and negative comments were inserted into the articles on U.S. Senator Bill Frist
Bill Frist
William Harrison "Bill" Frist, Sr. is an American physician, businessman, and politician. He began his career as an heir and major stockholder to the for-profit hospital chain of Hospital Corporation of America. Frist later served two terms as a Republican United States Senator representing...
and Eric Cantor
Eric Cantor
Eric Ivan Cantor is the U.S. Representative for Virginia's 7th congressional district, serving since 2001. A member of the Republican Party, he became House Majority Leader when the 112th Congress convened on January 3, 2011...
, a congressman from Virginia
Virginia
The Commonwealth of Virginia , is a U.S. state on the Atlantic Coast of the Southern United States. Virginia is nicknamed the "Old Dominion" and sometimes the "Mother of Presidents" after the eight U.S. presidents born there...
. Numerous other changes were made from an IP address
IP address
An Internet Protocol address is a numerical label assigned to each device participating in a computer network that uses the Internet Protocol for communication. An IP address serves two principal functions: host or network interface identification and location addressing...
which is assigned to the House of Representatives. In an interview, Jimmy Wales
Jimmy Wales
Jimmy Donal "Jimbo" Wales is an American Internet entrepreneur best known as a co-founder and promoter of the online non-profit encyclopedia Wikipedia and the Wikia company....
remarked that the changes were "not cool."
On August 31, 2008, The New York Times ran an article detailing the edits made to the biography of Sarah Palin
Sarah Palin
Sarah Louise Palin is an American politician, commentator and author. As the Republican Party nominee for Vice President in the 2008 presidential election, she was the first Alaskan on the national ticket of a major party and first Republican woman nominated for the vice-presidency.She was...
in the wake of her nomination as running mate of John McCain
John McCain
John Sidney McCain III is the senior United States Senator from Arizona. He was the Republican nominee for president in the 2008 United States election....
. During the 24 hours before the McCain campaign announcement, 30 edits, many of them flattering details, were made to the article by Wikipedia single-purpose user identity Young Trigg. This person later acknowledged working on the McCain campaign, and having several Wikipedia user accounts.
Larry Delay and Pablo Bachelet write that from their perspective, some articles dealing with Latin American history and groups (such as the Sandinistas
Sandinista National Liberation Front
The Sandinista National Liberation Front is a socialist political party in Nicaragua. Its members are called Sandinistas in both English and Spanish...
and Cuba
Cuba
The Republic of Cuba is an island nation in the Caribbean. The nation of Cuba consists of the main island of Cuba, the Isla de la Juventud, and several archipelagos. Havana is the largest city in Cuba and the country's capital. Santiago de Cuba is the second largest city...
) lack political neutrality and are written from a sympathetic Marxist perspective which treats socialist dictatorships favorably at the expense of alternate positions.
In November 2007, libelous accusations were made against two politicians from southwestern France, Jean-Pierre Grand
Jean-Pierre Grand
Jean-Pierre Grand is a French politician, born November 18, 1950, in Montpellier, Hérault, France. As of 2007, he serves as the mayor of Castelnau-Le-Lez and as Deputy in the French National Assembly ....
and Hélène Mandroux-Colas
Hélène Mandroux-Colas
Hélène Mandroux-Colas is a French politician. A member of the Socialist Party since 1982, her career in Montpellier debuted in Georges Frêche's municipal administration. Frêche gave her important responsibilities such as finances, municipal staff, legal affairs since 1995, and vice-mayor from 2001...
, on their Wikipedia biographies. Jean-Pierre Grand asked the president of the French National Assembly
French National Assembly
The French National Assembly is the lower house of the bicameral Parliament of France under the Fifth Republic. The upper house is the Senate ....
and the Prime Minister of France
Prime Minister of France
The Prime Minister of France in the Fifth Republic is the head of government and of the Council of Ministers of France. The head of state is the President of the French Republic...
to reinforce the legislation on the penal responsibility of Internet sites and of authors who peddle false informations in order to cause harm. Senator Jean Louis Masson
Jean Louis Masson
Jean Louis Masson is a member of the Senate of France, representing the Moselle department. He is an independent.-References:*...
then requested the Minister of Justice to tell him whether it would be possible to increase the criminal responsibilities of hosting providers, site operators, and authors of libelous content; the minister declined to do so, recalling the existing rules in the LCEN law.
In 2009, Wikipedia banned the Church of Scientology
Church of Scientology
The Church of Scientology is an organization devoted to the practice and the promotion of the Scientology belief system. The Church of Scientology International is the Church of Scientology's parent organization, and is responsible for the overall ecclesiastical management, dissemination and...
from editing any articles on its site. The Wikipedia articles concerning Scientology were edited by members of the group to improve its portrayal.
On August 25, 2010, the Toronto Star
Toronto Star
The Toronto Star is Canada's highest-circulation newspaper, based in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Its print edition is distributed almost entirely within the province of Ontario...
reported that the Canadian "government is now conducting two investigations into federal employees who have taken to Wikipedia to express their opinion on federal policies and bitter political debates."
In 2010, Al Jazeera
Al Jazeera
Al Jazeera is an independent broadcaster owned by the state of Qatar through the Qatar Media Corporation and headquartered in Doha, Qatar...
's Teymoor Nabili suggested that the article Cyrus Cylinder
Cyrus cylinder
The Cyrus Cylinder is an ancient clay cylinder, now broken into several fragments, on which is written a declaration in Akkadian cuneiform script in the name of the Achaemenid king Cyrus the Great. It dates from the 6th century BC and was discovered in the ruins of Babylon in Mesopotamia in 1879...
had been edited for political purposes by "an apparent tussle of opinions in the shadowy world of hard drives and 'independent' editors that comprise the Wikipedia industry." He suggested that after the Iranian presidential election, 2009
Iranian presidential election, 2009
Iran's tenth presidential election was held on 12 June 2009, with incumbent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad running against three challengers. The next morning the Islamic Republic News Agency, Iran's official news agency, announced that with two-thirds of the votes counted, Ahmadinejad had won the election...
and the ensuing "anti-Iranian activities" a "strenuous attempt to portray the cylinder as nothing more than the propaganda tool of an aggressive invader" was visible. The edits following his analysis of the edits during 2009 and 2010, represented "a complete dismissal of the suggestion that the cylinder, or Cyrus' actions, represent concern for human rights or any kind of enlightened intent," in stark contrast to Cyrus
Cyrus the Great
Cyrus II of Persia , commonly known as Cyrus the Great, also known as Cyrus the Elder, was the founder of the Achaemenid Empire. Under his rule, the empire embraced all the previous civilized states of the ancient Near East, expanded vastly and eventually conquered most of Southwest Asia and much...
' own reputation as documented in the Old Testament
Old Testament
The Old Testament, of which Christians hold different views, is a Christian term for the religious writings of ancient Israel held sacred and inspired by Christians which overlaps with the 24-book canon of the Masoretic Text of Judaism...
and the people of Babylon.
Arab-Israeli conflict
In April 2008, the Boston-based Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA
Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America
The Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America is an American non-profit pro-Israel media watchdog group. The group says it was founded in 1982 "to respond to the Washington Post's coverage of Israel's Lebanon incursion", and to respond to what it considers the media's "general...
) organized an e-mail campaign to encourage readers to correct perceived Israel-related biases and inconsistencies in Wikipedia. Excerpts of some of the e-mails were published in the July 2008 issue of Harper's Magazine
Harper's Magazine
Harper's Magazine is a monthly magazine of literature, politics, culture, finance, and the arts, with a generally left-wing perspective. It is the second-oldest continuously published monthly magazine in the U.S. . The current editor is Ellen Rosenbush, who replaced Roger Hodge in January 2010...
under the title of "Candid camera".
CAMERA argued the excerpts were unrepresentative and that it had explicitly campaigned merely "toward encouraging people to learn about and edit the online encyclopedia for accuracy". According to some defenders of CAMERA, serious misrepresentations of CAMERA's role emanated from the competing Electronic Intifada group; moreover, it is said, some other Palestinian advocacy groups have been guilty of systematic misrepresentations and manipulative behaviors but have not suffered bans of editors amongst their staff or volunteers.
Five editors involved in the campaign were sanctioned by Wikipedia administrators. Israeli diplomat David Saranga said that Wikipedia is generally fair in regard to Israel. When confronted with the fact that the entry on Israel mentioned the word "occupation" nine times, whereas the entry on the Palestinian People mentioned "terror" only once, he replied
"It means only one thing: Israelis should be more active on Wikipedia. Instead of blaming it, they should go on the site much more, and try and change it."
Political commentator Haviv Rettig Gur, reviewing widespread perceptions in Israel of systemic bias in Wikipedia articles, has argued that there are deeper structural problems creating this bias: anonymous editing favors biased results, especially if those Gur calls "pro-Palestinian activists" organize concerted campaigns as has been done in articles dealing with Arab-Israeli issues, and current Wikipedia policies, while well-meant, have proven ineffective in handling this.
On 3 August 2010, it was reported that the Yesha Council together with Israel Sheli (My Israel), a network of online pro-Israel activists committed to spreading Zionism online, were organizing people at a workshop in Jerusalem to teach them how to edit Wikipedia
Wikipedia
Wikipedia is a free, web-based, collaborative, multilingual encyclopedia project supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Its 20 million articles have been written collaboratively by volunteers around the world. Almost all of its articles can be edited by anyone with access to the site,...
articles in a pro-Israeli way. Around 50 people took part in the course.
The project organiser, Ayelet Shaked was interviewed on Arutz Sheva Radio
Arutz Sheva
Arutz Sheva is an Israeli media network identifying with Religious Zionism. It offers online news in English, Hebrew, French, Spanish and Russian. Arutz Sheva offers free podcasts, live streaming radio, a daily email news update, streaming video and 24 hour updated text news...
. She emphasized that the information has to be reliable and meet Wikipedia rules. She cited some examples such as the use of the term “occupation” in Wikipedia entries, as well as in the editing of entries that link Israel with Judea and Samaria
Judea and Samaria
Judea and Samaria Area is the official Israeli term roughly corresponding to the territory usually known outside Israel as the West Bank and to the Israeli settlements there that are not governed as part of Jerusalem.-Terminology:...
and Jewish history
Jewish history
Jewish history is the history of the Jews, their religion and culture, as it developed and interacted with other peoples, religions and cultures. Since Jewish history is over 4000 years long and includes hundreds of different populations, any treatment can only be provided in broad strokes...
"
"We don't want to change Wikipedia or turn it into a propaganda arm," commented Naftali Bennett
Naftali Bennett
Naftali Bennett is an Israeli businessman and a political activist and advisor, who serves as the Director General of the Yesha Council, since 2010....
, director of the Yesha Council. "We just want to show the other side. People think that Israelis are mean, evil people who only want to hurt Arabs all day." "The idea is not to make Wikipedia rightist but for it to include our point of view," he said in another interview.
A course participant explained that the course is not a “Zionist conspiracy to take over Wikipedia"; rather, it is an attempt to balance information about disputed issues presented in the online encyclopedia.
[T]he goal of this workshop was to train a number of pro-Israelis how to edit Wikipedia so that more people could present the Israeli side of things, and thus the content would be more balanced... Wikipedia is meant to be a fair and balanced source, and it is that way by having people from all across the spectrum contributing to the content.
Following the course announcement, Abdul Nasser An-Najar, the head of Palestinian Journalists Syndicate said there were plans to set up a counter group to ensure the Palestinian view is presented online as the "next regional war will be [a] media war."
In 2011, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales
Jimmy Wales
Jimmy Donal "Jimbo" Wales is an American Internet entrepreneur best known as a co-founder and promoter of the online non-profit encyclopedia Wikipedia and the Wikia company....
stated in retrospect about the course organized by Israel Sheli, “we saw absolutely no impact from that effort whatsoever. I don't think it ever – it was in the press but we never saw any impact.”
Editing for financial rewards
In January 2007, Rick Jelliffe claimed in a story carried by CBSCBS
CBS Broadcasting Inc. is a major US commercial broadcasting television network, which started as a radio network. The name is derived from the initials of the network's former name, Columbia Broadcasting System. The network is sometimes referred to as the "Eye Network" in reference to the shape of...
and IDG
IDG
International Data Group is a technology media, research, event management, and venture capital organization.IDG evolved from International Data Corporation which was formed in 1964 in Newtonville, Massachusetts, by Patrick Joseph McGovern and a friend, Fred Kirch...
News Service that Microsoft
Microsoft
Microsoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...
had offered him compensation in exchange for his future editorial services on OOXML. A Microsoft spokesperson, quoted by CBS, commented that "Microsoft and the writer, Rick Jelliffe, had not determined a price and no money had changed hands, but they had agreed that the company would not be allowed to review his writing before submission". CBS also quoted Jimmy Wales
Jimmy Wales
Jimmy Donal "Jimbo" Wales is an American Internet entrepreneur best known as a co-founder and promoter of the online non-profit encyclopedia Wikipedia and the Wikia company....
as having expressed his disapproval of Microsoft's involvement: "We were very disappointed to hear that Microsoft was taking that approach."
In a story covered by the BBC
BBC
The British Broadcasting Corporation is a British public service broadcaster. Its headquarters is at Broadcasting House in the City of Westminster, London. It is the largest broadcaster in the world, with about 23,000 staff...
, Jeffrey Merkey claimed that in exchange for a donation his Wikipedia entry was edited in his favor. Jay Walsh, a spokesman for Wikipedia, flatly denied the allegations in an interview given to the Daily Telegraph.
In a story covered by InformationWeek
InformationWeek
InformationWeek is a weekly print magazine, an online site with corresponding face-to-face and virtual events, and research. It is headquartered in San Francisco, California and was first published in 1979 by CMP Media, later called CMP Technology. On February 29, 2008, CMP Technology was...
, Eric Goldman, assistant law
Law
Law is a system of rules and guidelines which are enforced through social institutions to govern behavior, wherever possible. It shapes politics, economics and society in numerous ways and serves as a social mediator of relations between people. Contract law regulates everything from buying a bus...
professor at Santa Clara University
Santa Clara University
Santa Clara University is a private, not-for-profit, Jesuit-affiliated university located in Santa Clara, California, United States. Chartered by the state of California and accredited by the Western Association of Schools and Colleges, it operates in collaboration with the Society of Jesus , whose...
in California
California
California is a state located on the West Coast of the United States. It is by far the most populous U.S. state, and the third-largest by land area...
argued that "eventually, marketers will build scripts to edit Wikipedia pages to insert links and conduct automated attacks on Wikipedia", thus putting the encyclopedia beyond the ability of its editors to provide countermeasure
Countermeasure
A countermeasure is a measure or action taken to counter or offset another one. As a general concept it implies precision, and is any technological or tactical solution or system designed to prevent an undesirable outcome in the process...
s against the attackers, particularly because of a vicious circle
Virtuous circle and vicious circle
A virtuous circle and a vicious circle are economic terms. They refer to a complex of events that reinforces itself through a feedback loop. A virtuous circle has favorable results, while a vicious circle has detrimental results...
where the strain of responding to these attacks drives core contributors away, increasing the strain on those who remain.
However, Wikipedia operates bots to aid in the detection and removal of vandalism, and uses nofollow and a CAPTCHA
CAPTCHA
A CAPTCHA is a type of challenge-response test used in computing as an attempt to ensure that the response is generated by a person. The process usually involves one computer asking a user to complete a simple test which the computer is able to generate and grade...
to discourage and filter additions of external links.
Conflicts involving Wikipedia policy makers
In February 2008, British technology news and opinion website The Register
The Register
The Register is a British technology news and opinion website. It was founded by John Lettice, Mike Magee and Ross Alderson in 1994 as a newsletter called "Chip Connection", initially as an email service...
stated that a prominent administrator of Wikipedia had edited a topic area where he had a conflict of interest to keep criticism to a bare minimum, as well as altering the Wikipedia policies regarding personal biography and conflict of interest to favour his editing.
Some of the most scathing criticism of Wikipedia's claimed neutrality came in The Register, which in turn was allegedly criticized by founding members of the project. According to The Register:
Charles Arthur in The Guardian said that "Wikipedia, and so many other online activities, show all the outward characteristics of a cult
Cult
The word cult in current popular usage usually refers to a group whose beliefs or practices are considered abnormal or bizarre. The word originally denoted a system of ritual practices...
."
Commandeering or sanitizing articles
Articles of particular interest to an editor or group of editors are sometimes commandeered and sanitized to continually reflect a point of view that sheds a favorable light on the subject or group. Editors essentially "squat" on pages, watching for negative entries, then immediately revert them. This is especially true of pages on politicians as shown on USA Congressional staff edits to Wikipedia. The page on ScientologyScientology
Scientology is a body of beliefs and related practices created by science fiction and fantasy author L. Ron Hubbard , starting in 1952, as a successor to his earlier self-help system, Dianetics...
has also been subject to vandalism and protected under Wikipedia's Protection Policy.
Scientific disputes
The 2005 Nature study also gave two brief examples of challenges that Wikipedian science writers purportedly faced on Wikipedia. The first concerned the addition of a section on violence to the schizophrenia article, which exhibited the view of one of the article's regular editors, neuropsychologist Vaughan Bell, that it was little more than a "rant" about the need to lock people up, and that editing it stimulated him to look up the literature on the topic.The second dispute reported by Nature involved the climatologist William Connolley
William Connolley
William Michael Connolley is a British software engineer, writer, and blogger on climatology. Until December 2007 he was Senior Scientific Officer in the Physical Sciences Division in the Antarctic Climate and the Earth System project at the British Antarctic Survey, where he worked as a climate...
related to protracted disputes between editors of climate change topics, in which Connolley was placed on parole and several opponents banned from editing climate related articles for six months; a separate paper commented that this was more about etiquette than bias and that Connolley did "not suffer[] fools gladly".
See also
- 'Bourgeois v. Peters' (one of the earliest court opinions to cite and quote Wikipedia)
- Essjay controversyEssjay controversyThe Essjay controversy was an incident concerning a prominent Wikipedia participant and salaried Wikia employee, known by the username Essjay, who later identified himself as Ryan Jordan. Jordan held trusted volunteer positions within Wikipedia known as administrator, bureaucrat, arbitrator and...
- Internet encyclopedia projectInternet encyclopedia projectAn Internet encyclopedia project is a large database of useful information, accessible via the World Wide Web. The idea to build a free encyclopedia using the Internet can be traced at least to the 1993 Interpedia proposal; it was planned as an encyclopedia on the Internet to which everyone could...
- List of online encyclopedias
- VeropediaVeropediaVeropedia was a free, advertising-supported Internet encyclopedia project launched in late October 2007. It was taken down in January 2009 pending creation of a new version, which never arrived....
- Academic studies about WikipediaAcademic studies about WikipediaIn recent years there have been numerous academic studies about Wikipedia in peer-reviewed publications. This research can be grouped into two categories. The first analyzed the production and reliability of the encyclopedia content, while the second investigated social aspects, such as usage and...
- 'Truth in Numbers? Everything According to Wikipedia' (documentary)
- The works of Michael Gorman (covers the debates around his works including those about Wikipedia)
External links
- Librarians' Claims and Opinions Regarding Wikipedia
- UCSC Wiki Lab
- WikiDashboard
- WikiRage
- Study Finds Cancer Information on Wikipedia Is Accurate, but Not Very Readable – Thomas Jefferson University Hospitals