By Andrew Orlowski in San Francisco for The Register
This article has been reproduced from The Register, with
permission.
Criticism of the project from within the inner sanctum has been
very rare so far, although fellow co-founder Larry Sanger, who is
no longer associated with the project, pleaded with the management
to improve its content by befriending, and not
alienating, established sources of expertise. (i.e., people who
know what they're talking about.)
Meanwhile, criticism from outside the Wikipedia camp has been
rebuffed with a ferocious blend of irrationality and vigor that's
almost unprecedented in our experience: if you thought Apple,
Amiga, Mozilla or OS/2 fans were er, ... passionate, you haven't
met a wiki-fiddler. For them, it's a religious crusade.
In the inkies, Wikipedia has enjoyed a charmed life, with many
of the feature articles about the five-year old project resembling
advertisements. Emphasis is placed on the knowledgeable articles
(by any yardstick, it's excellent for Klingon, BSD Unix, and Ayn
Rand), the breadth of its entries (Klingon again), and
process issues such as speed.
"We don't ever talk about absolute quality," boasted one of the
project's prominent supporters, Clay Shirky, a faculty tutor at
NYU. But it's increasingly difficult to avoid the issue any
longer.
Especially since Wikipedia's material is replicated endlessly on
the web: it's the first port of call for "sploggers" who create
phoney sites, spam blogs, which created to promote their clients in
Google.
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.
Something that aspires to be a reference work ought to be judged
by the quality of the worst entry, he said, in response to the
clock-stopped, right-time defense of the project, not by the fact
it's got some good articles.
"In theory, Wikipedia is a beautiful thing it
has to be a beautiful thing if the Web is leading us to a
higher consciousness," writes Carr.
Only it isn't.
"An encyclopedia can't just have a small
percentage of good entries and be considered a success. I would
argue, in fact, that the overall quality of an encyclopedia is best
judged by its weakest entries rather than its best. What's the
worth of an unreliable reference work?"
Why, as an Emergent Phenomenon™ it provides a subject that can
be used for countless hours of class study for people like Clay
Shirky, of course. Good for him but what about the rest of
us?
Uncountable
Surprisingly, Wales agreed that the entries weren't up to
snuff.
"The two examples he puts forward are, quite frankly, a horrific
embarassment. [sic] Bill Gates and Jane Fonda are nearly unreadable
crap. Why? What can we do about it?" he
asked.
Traditionally, Wikipedia supporters have responded to criticism
in one of several ways. The commonest is: If you don't like an
entry, you can fix it yourself. Which is rather like going to a
restaurant for a date, being served terrible food, and then being
told by the waiter where to find the kitchen. But you didn't come
out to cook a meal - you could have done that at home! No matter,
roll up your sleeves.
As a second line of defense, Wikipedians point to flaws in the
existing dead tree encyclopedias, as if the handful of errors in
Britannica cancels out the many errors, hopeless apologies for
entries, and tortured prose, of Wikipedia itself.
Thirdly, and here you can see that the defense is beginning to
run out of steam, one's attention is drawn to process issues: such
as the speed with which errors are fixed, or the fact that looking
up a Wikipedia is faster than using an alternative. This
line of argument is even weaker than the first: it's like going to
a restaurant for a date and being pelted with rotten food,
thrown at you at high velocity by the waiters.
But the issue of readability poses even greater challenges. Even
when a Wikipedia entry is 100 per cent factually correct, and those
facts have been carefully chosen, it all too often reads as if it
has been translated from one language to another then into a
third, passing an illiterate translator at each stage. (Possibly if
one of these languages was Klingon, the entry might survive the
mauling, but that doesn't appear to be the case very often).
Here the problems begin, because readability is a quality that
can't be generated by a machine, or judged by one. It's the kind of
subjective valuation that the Wikipedians explicitly hate:
subjectivity is scorned for failing the positivist's NPOV test.
As a delicious illustration, Wikipedia appears to have a quality
problem with the word "quality" itself. While Merriam Webster
online offers us
eight major definitions, including "a) degree of excellence
: GRADE ... b : superiority in kind", and the Cambridge
Dictionary
three, of which two are "how good or bad something is
and of a high standard" Wikipedia's sister project
Wiktionary definition begins this. "1 - (uncountable) general
good value"
Now is that General Good Value as in something plucked from a
Wal-Mart sale? And "Uncountable"? Yes, indeed.
If this was a Marvel Comic, our superhero Objectivity would by
now be ensared in the evil coils of Subjectivity. There appears to
be no escape. Or is there?
Not good enough so what do we wikkin' do?
Re-working Wikipedia so it presents the user with something
minimally readable will be a mammoth task. Although the project has
no shortage of volunteers, most add nothing: busying themselves
with edits that simply add or takeaway a comma. These are
housekeeping tasks that build up credits for the participants, so
they can rise higher in the organization.
And Wikipedia's "cabal" has become notorious for deterring
knowledgable and literate contributors. One who became weary of the
in-fighting, Orthogonal, calls it Wikipedia's HUAC the House
of Unamerican Activities prominent in the McCarthy era for hunting
down and imprisoning the ideologically-incorrect.
So right now, the project appears ill-equipped to respond to the
new challenge. Its philosophical approach deters subjective
judgements about quality, and its political mindset deters outside
experts from helping.
This isn't promising.
One day Wikipedia may well be the most amazing reference work
the world has ever seen, lauded for its quality. But to get from
here to there it will need real experts and top quality
writing it won't get there by hoping that its whizzy
technical processes remedy such deficiencies. In other words, it
will resemble today's traditional encyclopedias far more than it
does today.
For now we simply welcome the candour: at least Wikipedia is
officially out of QD, or the "Quality Denial" stage.
Bootnote Of the many, many atrocious entries,
we'd like to bring one more to the HUAC's attention, and it's our
very favourite. As of the
time of writing, whoever wrote the entry for soul legend Baby
Washington has no idea who she is, but makes a wild guess, then
gives up completely with the less-than-helpful advice: "Many have
written inacurate information about Washington. She IS NOT 'BABY
WASHINGTON' from James Brown." (sic).
Indeed. But note that this entry has been edited no less than
seven times and can be found replicated at Biography.com,
Answers.com, Reference.com, InfoMutt, The Free Dictionary and
hundreds of other sites.
You've got to love the web. Just bask in that collective
intelligence.
© The Register
2005
