{"id":132,"date":"2005-10-24T23:50:47","date_gmt":"2005-10-25T05:50:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/wp\/?p=132"},"modified":"2005-10-24T23:50:47","modified_gmt":"2005-10-25T05:50:47","slug":"trouble_in_wiki","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=132","title":{"rendered":"Trouble in Wiki Land"},"content":{"rendered":"

The nonprofit Wikipedia Foundation’s announcement last Thursday that it is launching a money-making joint venture<\/a> with for-profit Answers.com has set off a storm of protest among contributors to the on-line, open-source encyclopedia. Many believe the commercial effort runs counter to the ideals of the vast Wikipedia community. “I feel utterly betrayed by the foundation,” writes one Wikipedian on a discussion page<\/a> at the site. “I will withdraw all and any support for the Wikipedia if this satanic project continues,” writes another. A third asks: “Has the WikiVatican started selling indulgences?”<\/p>\n

The rift comes at a time when the quality of the encyclopedia, which has long been held up as an example of the Internet’s ability to harness “collective intelligence,” is under debate (a debate set off by a critical post of mine<\/a> earlier this month). The Register today runs a series of letters<\/a> on Wikipedia from its readers. “While Wikipedia still has its defenders,” the online journal writes, “there’s a palpable relief that its shortcomings are finally being given the critical eye.” The Guardian Unlimited, which a year ago called Wikipedia<\/a> “one of the internet’s most inspiring success stories,” today ran a story headlined Can you trust Wikipedia?<\/a> in which it asked experts to rate some of the encyclopedia’s entries. The assessments ranged from “factually accurate” to “not terrible” to “inaccurate and unclear.”<\/p>\n

Even Web 2.0 guru Tim O’Reilly, in a sharp retort<\/a> to what he calls my “cynical rhetoric,” can’t quite bring himself to defend Wikipedia’s quality. Instead, he tries to make a case that any criticism of the encyclopedia is somehow politically incorrect: “How can we castigate Wikipedia as flawed when our conservative television news services managed to persuade their viewers that weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq, and that evidence was found linking Saddam Hussein to the Al Quaida attacks on 9\/11!” Now, that’s a smokescreen if I ever saw one.<\/p>\n

Ross Mayfield, another influential wiki-promoter, does rise to Wikipedia’s defense, but only by redefining it as something other than an encyclopedia: “I know of no goal of being authoritative, but the group voice that emerges on a page with enough edits (not time) represents a social authority that provides choice for the media literate.” Mayfield may not be aware of it, but the Wikipedia community has explicitly stated<\/a> that one of its goals is to make the encyclopedia “the most authoritative source of information in the world.” Its founder, Jimmy Wales, has also made it clear that he “intends that Wikipedia should achieve a ‘Britannica or better’ quality,” according to Wikipedia’s entry on itself<\/a>. Also, I’m not aware of any attempts to restrict access to Wikipedia’s content to what Mayfield calls, in a strange but perhaps revealing outburst of elitism, the “media literate.”<\/p>\n

Wikipedia wants itself to be judged as an encyclopedia, not as a “group voice [that] represents a social authority” (whatever that means). To fudge the issue and judge it as something other than an encyclopedia is, in my view, to be condescending toward the Wikipedians. It’s also a way to avoid a hard discussion about the true nature of “collective intelligence” on the web.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The nonprofit Wikipedia Foundation’s announcement last Thursday that it is launching a money-making joint venture with for-profit Answers.com has set off a storm of protest among contributors to the on-line, open-source encyclopedia. Many believe the commercial effort runs counter to the ideals of the vast Wikipedia community. “I feel utterly betrayed by the foundation,” writes […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-132","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/132","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=132"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/132\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=132"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=132"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=132"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}