What’s Up With Wikipedia?
Google anything, and chances are the first page of results will come up with a Wikipedia article. And it’s an incredibly quick and convenient way to look things up, there’s no question about that. I was reading an article that referenced Langrangian points, and the Wikipedia article (first in Google’s search returns) explained them in language that was accessible to a non-scientist like me. So far, so good.
There’s a catch, of course. As you probably know, anyone can write or edit a Wikipedia entry. That leaves a lot of room for erroneous and/or biased information to be included in any of the thousands of entries. And, yes, readers are encouraged to edit entries, either to correct mistakes or to add information not already there, the hope being that slanted material and inaccurate material will eventually get sifted out.
Sometimes it is. Sometimes it isn’t. And we tend to get seduced by the former, and ignore the latter.
Besides all that, thinking about Wikipedia raises the perennial issue of web anonymity. It’s been observed that, when shielded by anonymity, people will say and do things that they’d probably never dream of doing were their real name associated with the statement or act. We see this all over the web: some anonymous users are trolls, some are hateful, some are probably dangerous (as we saw with the horrible threats made to a female IT blogger last year). None are very nice. Just as people seem to morph into the lowest common denominator when in groups, so too do they seem to lose all civility and accountability when posting anonymously on the web.
What does this have to do with Wikipedia? Plenty, when you stop to realize that edits can be made anonymously there. Imagine the individual with an axe to grind and plenty of time on his hands, and you can imagine what havoc can be wreaked … and we’re not talking chatrooms here, we’re talking about a site that is perceived by many (including Google) as an authority site.
CIT graduate student Virgil Griffith did us all a service, I think, when he coded and released a tool called Wikiscanner; it allows one to see who has been editing Wikipedia entries anonymously. When Wikiscanner first came out, the expectation around the net was that the annymous posters who were furtively changing articles were what journalist Annalee Newitz has referred to as “some blogger writing in his basement in his pajamas.” Not so, as it turned out: Big Names were involved. As Newitz noted in a 2007 article on AlterNet:
“Turns out that all the anonymous propagansa nad lies on Wikipedia aren’t coming from basement dwellers at all––they’re coming from Congress, the CIA, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the ACLU. Somebody at Halliburton deleted key information from an entry on war crimes; Diebold, an electronic-voting machine manufacturer, deleted sections of its entry about a lawsuit filed against it. Someone at Pepsi deleted information about health problems caused by the soft drink. (…) And of course, the CIA has been editing the entry on the Iraq war.”
So there it is. The political ramifications of this discovery can be discussed ad infinitum, ad nauseaum, but the point for this particular blog (which is, after all, about words) is this: check out biases before you’re quick to see a source as authoritative. I recently edited two books that relied on Wikipedia for their source material, and had to have very long, very candid discussions with the authors over the wisdom of using something that is in many ways a moving target, to back up one’s points.
Don’t trust the net. It’s a fabulous tool but it can take over one’s thinking very quickly and very insidiously. When you receive a chain email, check Snopes before forwarding it to 346 of your closest friends. And use Wikipedia as a beginning for your research … but never as an end.
And then you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!
Posted in Tools, Process Matters, About Writing, Words on May 15th, 2008