"Just who would want to vandalise an entry on cheese?" wonders Skip, a Wikipedia administrator. Watching the online encyclopaedia's raw submission queue in real time can be unnerving. The online reference site that anyone can edit is defaced 20 times a minute and cheese, it seems, is one of the most popular targets for creative embellishment.
In the administrator's console, another fresh article - Wikipedia has more than a million now - scrolls past: "James is my fren," it reads in its entirety.
Robert McHenry, a former editor-in-chief of Encyclopaedia Britannica, has described Wikipedia as "a game without consequences". BBC Radio 1's afternoon DJs recently took turns to deface each other's entries live on air. MPs have joined in, too. But as Skip begins to guide me through the arcane and often Kafkaesque bureaucracy of Wikipedia, vandalism starts to look like the least of its problems.
Skip isn't his real name or his Wikipedia identity. It's a pseudonym the 30-year-old Silicon Valley IT professional uses as he documents the inner machinations of the project, along with a dozen other Wikipedia administrators, on a site called WikiTruth (www.wikitruth.info).
Wikipedia, endlessly replicated on the web, is one example of a glut of hazy information, the consequences of which we have barely begun to explore, that the internet has made endlessly available. Is Wikipedia really the best the net can offer - and if it isn't, where should we be looking for the answers?
While plenty of people nurse resentments against Wikipedia, having failed to win a consensus for their views, Skip's colleagues at WikiTruth have a different motivation. Branding themselves the true keepers of the flame, they argue Wikipedia's wounds are self-inflicted and unnecessary.
When the business author Nicholas Carr identified last October a typically banal Wikipedia entry (http://tinyurl.com/8mr5x), he prompted a rare admission. Wikipedia's co-founder and site owner Jimmy Wales agreed, calling the examples Carr cited "horrific crap". Yet these articles were mature, Carr pointed out, and had been edited hundreds of times. Might the mass participation be hurting, not helping?
Gradual deterioration
This gradual deterioration afflicts any utopian online space, and Skip ruefully notes even the best Wikipedia work - its catalogue of featured articles of the week - degenerates once out of the spotlight.
That isn't true, of course, of printed work such as Britannica's entries. But the encyclopaedia company has been hit hard, first by the arrival of CD-Rom-based rivals such as Microsoft's Encarta in 1993, and then the net. In 1996 it laid off its door-to-door sales staff. In 1999 it launched a website. The rise of Wikipedia as an "online encyclopaedia" has added to the pressure.
Now, though, Britannica has been taking the offensive. The company strongly rebutted a study conducted by journalists at Nature magazine that compared Wikipedia favourably to Britannica, and which was accompanied by an editorial plea for the scientific community to contribute to the project. The study blind-tested extracts from each site with experts, and was widely reported as showing them to be of comparable quality. "It should have said 31% less reliable and worse written," McHenry says of the Nature study. Britannica, meanwhile, says the study was biased towards Wikipedia. "It's offensive to lump these gross offences against publishing with a typo in Britannica," says its executive editor Theodore Pappas.
Britannica said Nature cited passages not in the encyclopedia and criticised it for refusing to publish the referees' reports. Nature says it stands by its report and can't release the full reports for confidentiality reasons.
Nature's news editor Jim Giles denies the journal had identified itself closely in the Wikipedia camp. "Each has its merits," he says. "In our editorial, we simply argued that Wikipedia has potential and sci
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A thirst for knowledge
"Just who would want to vandalise an entry on cheese?" wonders Skip, a Wikipedia administrator. Watching the online encyclopaedia's raw submission queue in real time can be unnerving. The online reference site that anyone can edit is defaced 20 times a minute and cheese, it seems, is one of the most popular targets for creative embellishment.
In the administrator's console, another fresh article - Wikipedia has more than a million now - scrolls past: "James is my fren," it reads in its entirety.
Robert McHenry, a former editor-in-chief of Encyclopaedia Britannica, has described Wikipedia as "a game without consequences". BBC Radio 1's afternoon DJs recently took turns to deface each other's entries live on air. MPs have joined in, too. But as Skip begins to guide me through the arcane and often Kafkaesque bureaucracy of Wikipedia, vandalism starts to look like the least of its problems.
Skip isn't his real name or his Wikipedia identity. It's a pseudonym the 30-year-old Silicon Valley IT professional uses as he documents the inner machinations of the project, along with a dozen other Wikipedia administrators, on a site called WikiTruth (www.wikitruth.info).
Wikipedia, endlessly replicated on the web, is one example of a glut of hazy information, the consequences of which we have barely begun to explore, that the internet has made endlessly available. Is Wikipedia really the best the net can offer - and if it isn't, where should we be looking for the answers?
While plenty of people nurse resentments against Wikipedia, having failed to win a consensus for their views, Skip's colleagues at WikiTruth have a different motivation. Branding themselves the true keepers of the flame, they argue Wikipedia's wounds are self-inflicted and unnecessary.
When the business author Nicholas Carr identified last October a typically banal Wikipedia entry (http://tinyurl.com/8mr5x), he prompted a rare admission. Wikipedia's co-founder and site owner Jimmy Wales agreed, calling the examples Carr cited "horrific crap". Yet these articles were mature, Carr pointed out, and had been edited hundreds of times. Might the mass participation be hurting, not helping?
Gradual deterioration
This gradual deterioration afflicts any utopian online space, and Skip ruefully notes even the best Wikipedia work - its catalogue of featured articles of the week - degenerates once out of the spotlight.
That isn't true, of course, of printed work such as Britannica's entries. But the encyclopaedia company has been hit hard, first by the arrival of CD-Rom-based rivals such as Microsoft's Encarta in 1993, and then the net. In 1996 it laid off its door-to-door sales staff. In 1999 it launched a website. The rise of Wikipedia as an "online encyclopaedia" has added to the pressure.
Now, though, Britannica has been taking the offensive. The company strongly rebutted a study conducted by journalists at Nature magazine that compared Wikipedia favourably to Britannica, and which was accompanied by an editorial plea for the scientific community to contribute to the project. The study blind-tested extracts from each site with experts, and was widely reported as showing them to be of comparable quality. "It should have said 31% less reliable and worse written," McHenry says of the Nature study. Britannica, meanwhile, says the study was biased towards Wikipedia. "It's offensive to lump these gross offences against publishing with a typo in Britannica," says its executive editor Theodore Pappas.
Britannica said Nature cited passages not in the encyclopedia and criticised it for refusing to publish the referees' reports. Nature says it stands by its report and can't release the full reports for confidentiality reasons.
Nature's news editor Jim Giles denies the journal had identified itself closely in the Wikipedia camp. "Each has its merits," he says. "In our editorial, we simply argued that Wikipedia has potential and sci
I agree, wikipedia is not reliable enough for day - to - day information, let alone as a critical scientific tool. I can't see it working.
timothy