In Other News, Sky Reported As “Blue”
Oct 21, 05 | 11:04 pm by John LopezWikipedia founder admits to serious quality problems:
Encouraging signs from the Wikipedia project, where co-founder and überpedian Jimmy Wales has acknowledged there are real quality problems with the online work.
…
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.
Wikipedia is the Internet equivalent of a public toilet. Anyone can use the facilities, including that subset of folks who simply splash feces around for the fun of it, or who are too dumb or ill-bred to get everything inside the rim.
And what incentive is there for anyone to clean up a public toilet, or to correct Wikipedia entries? The adulation of people with opportunity costs similar to yours (that is, folks who have nothing better to do than mop up some stranger’s crap for free)? What kind of a job are they going to do?
As an experiment, I checked out Wikipedia entries on a couple of subjects I have a passing knowledge of. They were poorly written to the point of self-contradiction, and riddled with errors and omissions. I cleaned up a few sentences of one, but why bother with making that entry actually worth reading? A quick Google search of the matter at hand reveals companies who offer much more comprehensive information on the web, for free even.
And why?
Because they have a serious motive for doing so: profit. They’re giving away information in order to convince you that they’re subject matter experts and that you should buy the products they’re selling. Wikipedians on the other hand are busy correcting extra plurals or adding “Wikilinks” to their entry, because they lack both the motivation and the aptitude to add content. And I’m not about to help them, since I have better things to do than reproduce material from expert sources that’re only a mouse click away from anyone who gives half a damn.
Not to say that every Wikipedia entry is worthless any more than every park bathroom is inches awash in bodily fluids. But chances are that a for-profit produced reference or bathroom is going to be a lot nicer to use than its free-for-all equivalent. And stay well away from anything remotely controversial.
Tip: Sunni Maravillosa.
October 21st, 2005 at Oct 21, 05 | 11:28 pm
Right on, Lopez.
October 22nd, 2005 at Oct 22, 05 | 12:32 pm
It’s the Tragedy of The Commons.
October 23rd, 2005 at Oct 23, 05 | 12:59 am
Its not the tragedy of the commons at all. The tragedy of the commons occurs when uses of the common resource deplete the resource. Obviously using wikipedia does not deplete the value of the information therein.
October 26th, 2005 at Oct 26, 05 | 10:51 am
I find, on non-controversial topics, that Wikipedia is quite valuable. You’re quite right that on controversial topics, Wikipedia isn’t very good (and I would consider “Bill Gates” a controversial topic/figure). But on topics that aren’t terribly controversial - such as languages, historical overviews of different countries, math, etc. - that Wikipedia is really quite good.
October 31st, 2005 at Oct 31, 05 | 2:15 am
Holmes is right about the differences between controversial and non-controversial articles, and having dealt with some of the characters who make editing an article such as WikiPedia:Anarcho-capitalism such a tremendous pain in the ass, I think I have some idea why. WikiPedia is based on a surprisingly simple and surprisingly robust consensus process, but consensus processes have problems when faced with belligerent fanatics and self-appointed hall monitors, and controversial articles attract both. (The kind of editing that instant in-place revisions on web content makes easy also encourages certain kinds of incoherent mishmash that accumulate when the hall monitors make several lazy edits that attempt to do away with controversy by piling on endless qualifying phrases.)
As for the complaint that WikiPedia contributors don’t have an incentive to help produce good articles because they don’t make a profit from a good outcome, there are two things that I wish I understood better. (1) First, “profit:” when you assert that WikiPedia contributors don’t have a profit motive, what do you count as “profit”? Does it have to be monetary? (2) What sort of outcomes do you have in mind that would qualify as “good outcomes” for an information source? (Is it a single characteristic, or are there multiple characteristics? If multiple, are there any trade-offs involved?)
November 1st, 2005 at Nov 01, 05 | 12:11 am
Rad,
My assertion is that Wikipedians don’t have a “serious motive” for contributing. Money is a serious motive, serious enough that I personally trade away a good third of my life for it. It’s fair to say that there are serious nonmonetary incentives to produce things, but if WikiPedians have nonmonetary incentives that induce them to produce quality, I haven’t seen too much of it.
What consequences do Wikipedians face if their information isn’t accurate? Nothing that I can see, the technical articles that I looked at essentially started off as cribbed “Technical Brief” paragraphs, and subsequent edits went mostly downhill (if that’s possible) from there. That’s what I mean by a lack of a serious motive: if you read an article like that on a manufacturer’s website, you’d shit-can them as a potential vendor so fast that their heads’d spin.
Wikipedia entries don’t have to be factual or useful, they just have to please other Wikipedians. And that’s a pretty easy bar to get over, for anyone who cares.
It simply has to be useful. Wikipedia is struggling with that.