Why I Don't Like Wikipedia

Wikipedia is a success.

It has a massive following, with hundreds of thousands of entries. However, it is it's success that is it's biggest problem. In the past few months, Wikipedia has been getting a lot of bad publicity, most recently over an entry about John Seigenthaler, a former Robert Kennedy aide who was libelled on Wikipedia - the entry said that he was implicated in the assassination of JFK. The Register has a story about it here.

This is a problem that just won't go away for Wikipedia. By definition, the entries lack authority.

I don't think that anybody is saying that the idea of Wikipedia is a bad one - the idea that the people of the internet can combine their knowledge in one place is fantastic. However, the way it is done leaves it wide open to abuse.

Some of you know I run the website for a large UK school, and the Wikipedia page about them comes up second on a google search for their name. That in itself isn't a problem, and is proof of Wikipedia's success. However, because it is such a prominent page in search results, we have to make sure it is correct, even though we didn't create it in the first place.

Firstly, most of the information on the page has been copy-and-pasted from our site. We're ok with that, but it does mean that when we update our site, I have to go over to Wikipedia and check that it is still correct. I am more than tempted to delete the information on the page and replace it with links into the school site - that's the point of hyperlinks, after all - but I am sure that that would be unpopular with the other page 'contributors', so haven't tried.

Secondly, the fact that anybody can write anything means that some people will. Over the past few months the Wikipedia page has been repeatedly defaced - usually very subtly, and it is made to sound realistic, but it is totally untrue and if read by potential parents or pupils, very damaging to the image of the organisation.

The problems with the John Seigenthaler entry show that we're not alone. This is probably just the tip of the iceburg, but Wikipedia just doesn't seem to care. People argue that if I don't like it I can change the page myself, but that doesn't sit well with me. Anyone is free to anonymously libel me or my client, and the success of Wikipedia means that people will take it to be the truth. This is not like someone putting up a page on their website bad-mouthing us, readers would take that with a pinch of salt - but if Wikipedia are as good as they say, this is more akin to rewriting a page on the encyclopedia on my bookshelf. There is clearly something wrong here.

I don't see why I should have to go to this page every day to see if something has changed - Wikipedia are wasting my time. I can't check automatically - they don't seem to have an e-mail notifier, and they block my cron-jobbed perl script. What's even worse is that when I make these changes to correct the page, people on Wikipedia come along behind me, think that I am the one defacing it, and revert it to the incorrect version, even when I provide official URLs citing my changes!

The biggest problem with Wikipedia is that they have no way to tell who is an authoritative source of information. All the time that there is no editorial process between edit and view, it will be a toy that is open to abuse. If they can come up with a way to say "This person is an authority on this subject", and make sure that any changes have to go through them, then and only then can Wikipedia start to gain credibility and acceptance by its critics.

Comments

Jay

Agreed, you only need to look at the Wiki entry for my old school http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dormston_School to see that this problem certainly isn't uncommon.

You did however say that a lot of the wiki entry for your clients school was copied from the school website? I thought the wiki 'moderators' or whatever their called usually removed copied pages.

radiac

The content has been copied, but split up into sections. I'm sure I could complain, but at least the information there is accurate. I believe Wikipedia says that pages must have content and cannot simply be a page of links. In this case (and many others I'm sure) this seems a foolish policy - all Wikipedia is doing is duplicating content for the sake of it, and is just paraphrasing the internet. Anything that could be put on the wikipedia page is either already on the internet on the official site, or it's incorrect.

I don't like Wikipedia much at the moment ;)

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