Recently, scientific journal, Nature, published a report which asked scientific experts to peer review entries from two distinct sources, Wikipedia, and Encyclopedia Britannica. Interestingly, the report found that Encyclopedia Britanica only had margi…

Check out this joint wikipedia/google search thingy

I made for a home page.

Greg Lastowka makes the point that Wikipedia is just a reflection of the Web in regards to the question of reliability and verifiability. The parallels are striking.

One thing I didn’t mention is that Wikipedia has become a poster child for a lot of people (admittedly I’m one) who point to it as a model of distributed information production in opposition to more traditional models. So a lot of people want it to be more than it is, and a lot of people want it to be less than it is. Because of this, it stands in as a proxy in certain debates over information politics.

I think that the wiki by itself is an imperfect technology. However, I predict that wikis will soon fuse with other Web 2.0 technologies, making wikis more ammenable to creative and political settings.

If your curious, you should check out Democracy 2.0, which is a wiki experimenting with the idea of collaborative legislation. Although just launched and slightly clumsy, the results are fairly interesting.

Part of the point, I think, is that the Wiki isn’t just the same as the Web, it is an improvement on the Web insofar as it concentrates information resources in a more coherent and collaborative system.

One possible downside I see (that I don’t want to go into too much here) is that while the wiki model works well for functional projects (Linux) where everyone agrees on a paradigm of software performance and what is a “bug,” forcing collaborative agreement doesn’t work quite as well for content that is more inherently artistic or political. (Hence, Orin’s laments about the Patriot Act.) But, like I said, I like Wikis & I think more people should be exposed to them.

I remember in middle school writing papers and being told not to cite encyclopedia’s because they were often out-of-date or soft on analysis. I don’t see how this rule of thumb should be different for Wikipedia.

However, I think that the overall utility of Wikipedia and other wikis will eventually make them a mainstay of our culture. Every individual possesses various wells of information. Wikis provide people with an efficient avenue to share this information with others, on the terms people want.

Wikis are also comparatively cheap to run. The traditional media model is hire expensive experts and sell the product. Wikis aggregate people’s knowledge and produce something in the ballpark of the traditional media model.

Even if the traditional media has a slight advantage over wikis in terms of accuracy, the advantages will narrow as more people use and contribute to wikis. Linus’s Law instructs us that the more people who look at a given piece of information the more accurate the information will become. Currently Wikipedia has 2.5 billion page-views per week, if that number increased to 5 billion page views per day the information would likely become more accurate.

Wikipedia’s true problem is its novelty. Society has yet to embrace this technology, just as people were hestitant to accept other new forms of technology (the internet, cars, television). As the novelty wears and wikis utilitarian benefits will remain and everyone will have an additional resource. We all benefit from this.

But while I still doubt it is true, I think we need to confirm it is untrue. *News alert! Once in a while, the stuff you read in Weekly World News might actually be true!* (I used to buy it in college and remember two separate times when I read something in the WWN and had seen the same story elsewhere in respectable media.) This is the kind of weird story from the WWN that just might be true (but might not be.)

Actually, part of the above post, which I cut but I’ll now indulge in, was about how Wikipedia might be useful as a teaching tool regarding our trust in any kind of printed authority. For instance, when I was reading Orin’s comments about Wikipedia’s lack of trustworthiness on the Patriot Act, I asked myself if I would trust something Orin published on the Patriot Act? Orin is a brilliant guy imho, and I’m sure he knows more about the Patriot Act than 99.99% of the people in the country — but sometimes people make mistakes, or have particular opinions, etc. Would I feel comfortable simply relying on his summary if an interpretation of the Act was really important to me?

And re the WWN’s funny place among newspapers, even putting aside folks like Jayson Blair, I’m often pretty stunned by how much journalists in generally reliable organizations get wrong when they write about a subject that I know well.