Wikipedia Quality Alert

[MMMMMM]

It seems that Wikipedia, the online user-written encyclopedia, is having some serious quality problems and its founder has admitted as much.

"Wikipedia founder admits to serious quality problems

By Andrew Orlowski in San Francisco
Published Tuesday 18th October 2005 03:48 GMT

Encouraging signs from the Wikipedia project, where co-founder and überpedian Jimmy Wales has acknowledged there are real quality problems with the online work.

Criticism of the project from within the inner sanctum has been very rare so far, although fellow co-founder Larry Sanger, who is no longer associated with the project, pleaded with the management to improve its content by befriending, and not alienating, established sources of expertise. (i.e., people who know what they're talking about.)


Meanwhile, criticism from outside the Wikipedia camp has been rebuffed with a ferocious blend of irrationality and vigor that's almost unprecedented in our experience: if you thought Apple, Amiga, Mozilla or OS/2 fans were er, ... passionate, you haven't met a wiki-fiddler. For them, it's a religious crusade.

In the inkies, Wikipedia has enjoyed a charmed life, with many of the feature articles about the five-year old project resembling advertisements. Emphasis is placed on the knowledgeable articles (by any yardstick, it's excellent for Klingon, BSD Unix, and Ayn Rand), the breadth of its entries (Klingon again), and process issues such as speed.

"We don't ever talk about absolute quality," boasted one of the project's prominent supporters, Clay Shirky, a faculty tutor at NYU. But it's increasingly difficult to avoid the issue any longer.

Especially since Wikipedia's material is replicated endlessly on the web: it's the first port of call for "sploggers" who create phoney sites, spam blogs, which created to promote their clients in Google.

Wales was responding to author Nicholas Carr, who in a dazzling post on the transcendent New Age "hive-mind" rhetoric that envelops the "Web 2.0" bubble, took time out to examine the quality of two entries picked at random: Bill Gates and Jane Fonda.

He wasn't impressed by what he saw.

"This is garbage, an incoherent hodge-podge of dubious factoids that adds up to something far less than the sum of its parts," he wrote.

Something that aspires to be a reference work ought to be judged by the quality of the worst entry, he said, in response to the clock-stopped, right-time defense of the project, not by the fact it's got some good articles.

"In theory, Wikipedia is a beautiful thing - it has to be a beautiful thing if the Web is leading us to a higher consciousness," writes Carr.

Only it isn't.

"An encyclopedia can't just have a small percentage of good entries and be considered a success. I would argue, in fact, that the overall quality of an encyclopedia is best judged by its weakest entries rather than its best. What's the worth of an unreliable reference work?"

Why, as an Emergent Phenomenon™ it provides a subject that can be used for countless hours of class study for people like Clay Shirky, of course. Good for him - but what about the rest of us?

Uncountable

Surprisingly, Wales agreed that the entries weren't up to snuff.

"The two examples he puts forward are, quite frankly, a horrific embarassment. [sic] Bill Gates and Jane Fonda are nearly unreadable crap. Why? What can we do about it?" he asked.

Traditionally, Wikipedia supporters have responded to criticism in one of several ways. The commonest is: If you don't like an entry, you can fix it yourself. Which is rather like going to a restaurant for a date, being served terrible food, and then being told by the waiter where to find the kitchen. But you didn't come out to cook a meal - you could have done that at home! No matter, roll up your sleeves.

As a second line of defense, Wikipedians point to flaws in the existing dead tree encyclopedias, as if the handful of errors in Britannica cancels out the many errors, hopeless apologies for entries, and tortured prose, of Wikipedia itself.

Thirdly, and here you can see that the defense is beginning to run out of steam, one's attention is drawn to process issues: such as the speed with which errors are fixed, or the fact that looking up a Wikipedia is faster than using an alternative. This line of argument is even weaker than the first: it's like going to a restaurant for a date - and being pelted with rotten food, thrown at you at high velocity by the waiters.

But the issue of readability poses even greater challenges. Even when a Wikipedia entry is 100 per cent factually correct, and those facts have been carefully chosen, it all too often reads as if it has been translated from one language to another then into to a third, passing an illiterate translator at each stage. (Possibly if one of these languages was Klingon, the entry might survive the mauling, but that doesn't appear to be the case very often).

Here the problems begin, because readability is a quality that can't be generated by a machine, or judged by one. It's the kind of subjective valuation that the Wikipedians explicitly hate: subjectivity is scorned for failing the positivist's NPOV test.

As a delicious illustration, Wikipedia appears to have a quality problem with the word "quality" itself. While Merriam Webster online offers us eight major definitions, including "a) degree of excellence : GRADE ... b : superiority in kind", and the Cambridge Dictionary three, of which two are "how good or bad something is and of a high standard" Wikipedia's sister project Wiktionary definition begins this. "1 - (uncountable) general good value"

Now is that General Good Value as in something plucked from a Wal-Mart sale? And "Uncountable"? Yes, indeed.

If this was a Marvel Comic, our superhero Objectivity would by now be ensared in the evil coils of Subjectivity. There appears to be no escape. Or is there?
Not good enough - so what do we wikkin' do?

Re-working Wikipedia so it presents the user with something minimally readable will be a mammoth task. Although the project has no shortage of volunteers, most add nothing: busying themselves with edits that simply add or takeaway a comma. These are housekeeping tasks that build up credits for the participants, so they can rise higher in the organization.

And Wikipedia's "cabal" has become notorious for deterring knowledgable and literate contributors. One who became weary of the in-fighting, Orthogonal, calls it Wikipedia's HUAC - the House of Unamerican Activities prominent in the McCarthy era for hunting down and imprisoning the ideologically-incorrect.

So right now, the project appears ill-equipped to respond to the new challenge. Its philosophical approach deters subjective judgements about quality, and its political mindset deters outside experts from helping.

This isn't promising.

One day Wikipedia may well be the most amazing reference work the world has ever seen, lauded for its quality. But to get from here to there it will need real experts and top quality writing - it won't get there by hoping that its whizzy technical processes remedy such deficiencies. In other words, it will resemble today's traditional encyclopedias far more than it does today.

For now we simply welcome the candour: at least Wikipedia is officially out of QD, or the "Quality Denial" stage.

Bootnote Of the many, many atrocious entries, we'd like to bring one more to the HUAC's attention, and it's our very favorite. As of the time of writing, whoever wrote the entry for soul legend Baby Washington has no idea who she is, but makes a wild guess, then gives up completely with the less-than-helpful advice: "Many have written inacurate information about Washington. She IS NOT "BABY WASHINGTON" from James Brown." (sic).

Indeed. But note that this entry has been edited no less than seven times and can be found replicated at Biography.com, Answers.com, Reference.com, InfoMutt, The Free Dictionary and hundreds of other sites.

You've got to love the web. Just bask in that collective intelligence.
"

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/10...ality_problem/

Comments or observations, Grey? Or anyone?

[vulturesrow]

I like Wikipedia, both the concept and to a lesser degree, the execution. I use it often, but basically as a launching point for more searches on the Web. Some of its more political material tends to slant one way or the other. But anyone who stops and start their search for knowledge at a single point, be it Wikipedia or any other source, deserves what they get in my opinion.

[lighterjobs]

that's ridiculous. the good (great) articles at wiki outweigh the bad by a landslide.

[MMMMMM]

[ QUOTE ]
that's ridiculous. the good (great) articles at wiki outweigh the bad by a landslide.

[/ QUOTE ]

That could well be, but isn't it supposed to be an ENCYCLOPEDIA; that is, a dependable overall reference source?

At least that's what I have always expected from an encyclopedia.

Maybe it should call itself a "compendium" instead of an"encyclopedia"...next thing you know we'll have online "dictionaries" where everyone gets to edit the "definitions"...wonder how that will turn out. There would probably be more "good" definitions than "bad" definitions in such a dictionary, but is that really the point of a reference work? Or maybe I'm just misinterpreting the purpose of Wikipedia...maybe it never intended itself to be a reliable reference work, but rather something else...?

[andyfox]

I just read the Jane Fonda entry. I think it's pretty good. Maybe too much emphasis on her political activism, but I guess that's become what people think about when they hear her name, rather than her acting and business careers. But those too are covered. I didn't find it unreadable or incoherent.

[MMMMMM]

[ QUOTE ]
I just read the Jane Fonda entry. I think it's pretty good. Maybe too much emphasis on her political activism, but I guess that's become what people think about when they hear her name, rather than her acting and business careers. But those too are covered. I didn't find it unreadable or incoherent.


[/ QUOTE ]

I haven't read that entry yet, but maybe that entry has already been modified?

[BluffTHIS!]

[ QUOTE ]
I like Wikipedia, both the concept and to a lesser degree, the execution. I use it often, but basically as a launching point for more searches on the Web. Some of its more political material tends to slant one way or the other. But anyone who stops and start their search for knowledge at a single point, be it Wikipedia or any other source, deserves what they get in my opinion.

[/ QUOTE ]

I agree with this quote as far as how you should use Wiki, and enjoy using it myself for many quick lookups, but would not depend on it for being exhaustive let alone authoritative. But MMMMM has a point regarding quality. There are two problems noted in the article, factual correctness and literary quality of the writing.

If you take a field of knowledge you are interested in and wish to add/edit, then mostly it can only be done based on your own personal knowledge and is limited by copyright constraints which prevent users from just plagiarizing autoritative texts which are often copyrighted. It seems to me from reading Wiki articles on lots of different topics, that except for a few scientific topics, there is not a lot of contribution from eminent professionals in those fields who possess not only the requisite knowledge, but also the desire to take the time to contribute. And as far as the quality of writing goes, the only way to raise that would be to have dedicated users who are good writers and edit new and existing topics soley for the purpose of insuring a more well written article, something that the users who put forth the effort to originally contribute something might resent.

Wikipedia is a worthy project still very much in its infancy, but it does seem the process issues need revision to allow for editorial input for better writing quality, and review by professionals in various fields to check the accuracy of facts.

And regarding the politicized topics, I have seen plenty of conflict. Using a US political example, in an overall topic of US politics, all political parties and streams of thought should be represented, but in a specific party topic, members of other parties should not be allowed to give dissenting views about a rival party's platform, when that should appropriately be given in their own party's article.

It would seem to me, that the best way to insure quality in the long term, would be to establish partnerhips with a globally representative group of universities who would have students and grad students overseen by professors regularly contributing and editing various fields. Perhaps this is already being done, though I am not aware of it.

[ACPlayer]

This is true of practically all information sites on the web. One must look at them as a source not the sourse. Anyone looking at Wikipedia (or other sites) as a source for scholarly research or even a thorough understanding of the topic is making a basic mistake in research methodology. Having said that Wikipedia is a pretty good starting point for the casual research evident in most posts on this forum.

Even more true of "opinion" sites.

[Aytumious]

[ QUOTE ]
I like Wikipedia, both the concept and to a lesser degree, the execution. I use it often, but basically as a launching point for more searches on the Web. Some of its more political material tends to slant one way or the other. But anyone who stops and start their search for knowledge at a single point, be it Wikipedia or any other source, deserves what they get in my opinion.

[/ QUOTE ]

I agree. One of the main uses I've found is the "External Links" at the bottom of the entries. These are often links to more authoritative sources that I may not have thought of or found through a search engine.

[Zeno]

I have a complete set of Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1958 edition, dedicated to Dwight David Eisenhower and Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth The Second. Twenty-four Volumes.

It serves me well.

-Zeno