Some thoughts on Wikipedia

Bruce M GittingsUniversity of Edinburgh

The Wikipedia Effect

• Wikipedia is potentially unreliable• Who wrote the entry?

– professor, subject-expert, school-kid…– quite possibly all of the above

• What is their agenda?• What research did they do?

– looked at another web site?– Were the facts checked?

• What you see today was not there yesterday and will probably be different tomorrow

• Vandalism, dilution or corruption of good entries• The head-honcho made his money as an online

pornographer

Bias and Peculiar Agendas

• Cultural and political bias• US-oriented:

– spelling (often alternatives are not provided)– dates eg. 01/31/07 (confuse)– opaque meaning; the following means little to someone

from the UK:A hamburger is a sandwich that consists of a broiled patty of

ground meat that is usually beef

• Examples whereby staff of political rivals edit each other's entries

• Wikipedia gives a platform for those with ‘peculiar’ agendas, not normally the place of an encyclopedia

Lack of Discrimination

• Tendency to include everything• Entries often become very long and unreadable• A good editor would select the key facts, often aided by

strict page limits, but this process is largely missing• In part because they don't understand that the job of a

reference editor is rather more than just fixing typos• There are rather too many stark facts, a number of

which are distasteful and you wouldn't want your children to see!

James Neil Tucker (January 12, 1957 – May 28, 2004) was a convicted murderer executed by the U.S. state of South Carolina by means of the electric chair … Two jolts were required to execute Tucker for the murder of Rosa Lee Dolly Oakley. Witnesses said that his body jerked upwards as the current flowed through his body. The second jolt lasted two minutes. He was officially pronounced dead at 6:11 p.m … For his last meal, he ordered pizza, Mountain Dew and two BLT sandwiches.

Just plain wrong

• Bad spelling and grammar or badly written English does not inspire confidence or encourage students to improve the quality of their prose; while this is usually corrected the fact these errors are common suggests new problems are introduced as quickly as old problems are fixed

• From the Wikipedia entry on Wikipedia (Feb, 2007):Wikipedia's English edition was lunched on January 15, 2001

• Internal inconsistencies – always a difficult thing to check thoroughly in reference works, but it would be expected that Wikipedia, with its teams of enthusiastic editors, would ensure these didn’t exist

Anti Scholarship

• Wikipedia recycles information from one place on the web to another, usually with no added value, but detracting from the original source

• Researchers like to get recognition for their work by seeing it on their own web site; Wikipedia lifts material from other web sites regularly with no acknowledgment of original effort

• Its playing hard-and-loose with copyright laws are a disincentive to professional reference editors putting material on the web

• This discourages scholarship • Its clones repeat the same bias / errors several times

over; an ‘intelligent’ geo-aggregator might regard facts as correct because they are repeated

Gazetteers and Wikipedia

• The Wikipedia model is an extraordinarily bad one for gazetteer services

• Initial appeal = get the populous to generate your data / write your entries

• Consistency and standards • Limited or no geographical understanding• It is valuable to get comments / feedback / corrections

through the wiki model…• … but then professional input is required to facilitate

discrimination, selection of facts etc.

• However Wikipedia has already become a geo-referenced 'authoritative' gazetteer service whether we like it or not !!!