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Criticism of Wikipedia

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Criticism of Wikipedia has increased with its prominence. Critics of Wikipedia include Wikipedia editors themselves, ex-editors, and representatives of other encyclopedias. Notable criticisms include that its open nature makes Wikipedia unauthoritative and unreliable, that Wikipedia exhibits systemic bias and that the group dynamics of its community are hindering its goals.

Criticism of the concept

Usefulness as a reference

Wikipedia's utility as a reference work has been questioned. The lack of authority, accountability, and peer review are considered disqualifying factors by some. For example, librarian Philip Bradley acknowledged in an interview with The Guardian that the concept behind the site was in theory a "lovely idea," but that he would not use it in practice and is

"[…] not aware of a single librarian who would. The main problem is the lack of authority. With printed publications, the publishers have to ensure that their data is reliable, as their livelihood depends on it. But with something like this, all that goes out the window." (Waldman, 2004).

Likewise, Robert McHenry, former editor-in-chief of Encyclopædia Britannica said:

"The user who visits Wikipedia to learn about some subject, to confirm some matter of fact, is rather in the position of a visitor to a public restroom. It may be obviously dirty, so that he knows to exercise great care, or it may seem fairly clean, so that he may be lulled into a false sense of security. What he certainly does not know is who has used the facilities before him." (McHenry, 2004).

In response to this criticism, proposals have been made to provide various forms of provenance for material in the articles, e.g., see Wikipedia:Provenance. However, these proposals are quite controversial.

People supporting the idea of Wikipedia counter these arguments by saying that Wikipedia is a more independent source than most traditional encyclopedias. They argue that the reliability is potentially greater than that of a traditional source, since errors can be corrected immediately, and point out that the formal processes used by academic sources (peer review, etc.) are also prone to human error. Others contend that no information should be taken at face value, regardless of the source. In addition, supporters contend that any criticism originating from Encyclopædia Britannica and other encyclopedias is colored by their competition with Wikipedia.

File:Foxtrot wikipedia.jpg
FoxTrot comic from May 7, 2005 discussing Wikipedia.
File:Bunny 303.png
Bunny № 303, lampooning the falsely reported death of Jeph Jacques on his Wikipedia page.

Academic circles have not been exclusively dismissive of Wikipedia as a reference. Wikipedia articles have been referenced in "enhanced perspectives" provided on-line in the journal Science. The first of these perspectives to provide a hyperlink to Wikipedia was "A White Collar Protein Senses Blue Light" (Linden, 2002), and dozens of enhanced perspectives have provided such links since then. However, these links are offered as background sources for the reader, not as sources used by the writer, and the "enhanced perspectives" are not intended to serve as reference material themselves.

Anti-elitism as a weakness

Former Chief Editor of Nupedia, Larry Sanger, stated in an opinion piece in kuro5hin that "anti-elitism", active contempt for expertise, was rampant in the Wikipedia community. He further stated: "Far too much credence and respect [is] accorded to people who in other Internet contexts would be labelled 'trolls.'"

A common Wikipedia maxim is "Out of mediocrity, excellence." Jimmy Wales, the site founder, admits that wide variations in quality between different articles and topics is certainly not insignificant, but that he considers the average quality to be "pretty good", getting better by the day.

The "competing" Encyclopædia Britannica claims it does not feel threatened. "The premise of Wikipedia is that continuous improvement will lead to perfection; that premise is completely unproven," said the reference work's executive editor, Ted Pappas, to The Guardian.

Systemic bias in coverage

Wikipedia has been accused of systemic bias, a tendency to cover topics in a detail disproportionate to their importance. Even the site's proponents admit to this unavoidable flaw. In an interview with The Guardian, Dale Hoiberg, the editor-in-chief of Encyclopædia Britannica, a competing encyclopedia, noted that "people write of things they're interested in, and so many subjects don't get covered; and news events get covered in great detail. The entry on Hurricane Frances is more than five times the length of that on Chinese art, and the entry on Coronation Street is twice as long as the article on Tony Blair." (Waldman, 2004).

This statement was written on October 26, 2004. By March 28, 2005, without counting subarticles, the Chinese art article had become three times as large as the article on Hurricane Frances, while the article on Tony Blair was 50% larger than the article on Coronation Street. Proponents of Wikipedia point to such statistics in arguing that bias by editor favoritism will diminish over time. Opponents point out that these articles drew attention from the Wikipedia community because they were specifically mentioned by Hoiberg, and this increase in size was not universal - all other articles on Wikipedia did not see similar increases in size during this time period.

The relative importance of articles is itself a highly controversial issue. Unlike a printed encyclopedia Wikipedia does not suffer from size constraints (see Wiki is not paper). The length of articles in an online hypertext dictionary should ultimately be determined only by the amount of information on the topic that a reader is likely to be interested in. The articles on Chinese art and Tony Blair both link to a large number of other articles within Wikipedia. Tony Blair the politician is defined by his relationship to and involvement in the affairs of the day. Coronation Street and Hurricane Frances are essentially self contained events that are not defined in the same way.

Below is a comparison between how many times Canada is mentioned in four encyclopedias and how many times Nigeria is mentioned. The second column is the ratio of mentions of Belgium to mentions of Rwanda.

Canada:
Nigeria 		Belgium:
Rwanda 		Encyclopedia
27:1 11:1 Wikipedia
19:1 4:1 Encarta
12:1 4:1 Columbia
5:1 4:1 Britannica

While it has long been one of Jimbo Wales' goals to distribute Wikipedia in the poor nations of the world, the current Wikipedia would give them a product that does an inadequate job of covering their regions.

Rough evaluation of coverage:

Coverage Region
Excellent North America, Japan, Western Europe, Australia & NZ
Good East Asia, Eastern Europe
Mediocre Latin America, Middle East, South Asia
Poor Sub-Saharan Africa


Systemic bias in perspective

A more difficult problem to address is that even when topics are covered, they are covered only from what seems to be a neutral point of view 'to the current participants', which is not the same as:

  • the current readership, especially not readers who encounter print or other uneditable versions
  • the potential readership.

While some critics have raised this issue within the Wikipedia community, they seem to consider their criticisms to have been generally rejected. For example, a 2002 attempt to ask questions about what would be required to prepare Wikipedia for the one billionth user went nowhere. Since that time there have been numerous efforts to address the difference between neutral point of view and the perspective of new contributors with views typical of some large group of people, but not typical of the average Wikipedia contributor. In short, new contributors who do not conform to the prevailing Wikipedian consensus (where such a consensus exists) are generally viewed as trolls and their views are dismissed. New user's dissenting contributions are liable to be labelled as "POV" if there is sufficient administrative support to attack or delete it.

In response to this issue, a group of Wikipedians on the English Wikipedia have established a WikiProject, Wikipedia:WikiProject Countering systemic bias. They have a list of open tasks which detail various areas they have determined need to be resolved.

Difficulty of fact checking

Wikipedia contains no formal peer review process for fact-checking, and due to the lack of requiring qualifications to edit any article, the editors themselves may not be well-versed in the topics they write about. Since the bulk of Wikipedia’s fact-checking involves an internet search, self-perpetuating errors are inevitable. The amount of fact-checking per page is directly related to the amount of frequent editors per page, thus errors on obscure topics may remain for some time. Even in pages with dozens of editors, a fact erroneously inserted along with dozens of other changes may "slip" into a page and stay. As well, since all edits of one user are displayed instantly to all readers, it is essentially impossible for any fact checking to occur until after the information (or misinformation) is already published.

Use of dubious sources

Wikipedia requests Wikipedians to verify the accuracy of information by checking the references cited, which generally come from external sources. Many of these articles often do not include references for statements made, nor do the articles differentiate between true, false, and opinion. Some critics contend that the references have come from dubious sources, such as blog entries. For example, a blog entry may contain several inaccuracies and stereotypes, because many bloggers may have their own self-interests. Critics contend that use of such unsound references give legitimacy to articles, which contain many falsehoods. An article about the soundness of a particular issue may find legitimacy by using references found on an organization's website supporting that particular stance.

Hiawatha Bray of the Boston Globe wrote: "So of course Wikipedia is popular. Maybe too popular. For it lacks one vital feature of the traditional encyclopedia: accountability. Old-school reference books hire expert scholars to write their articles, and employ skilled editors to check and double-check their work. Wikipedia's articles are written by anyone who fancies himself an expert." (Bray, 2004).

Criticism of the community

Criticism is also targeted at the community of Wikipedia editors, whose group dynamics manifest themselves in how and by whom articles are edited. Critics of these processes argue that they are actively hindering the production of a quality encyclopedia.

"Flame wars"

Some people predict that Wikipedia is going to end up as "just as a bunch of flame wars". This concern has been acknowledged by Wikipedia's community, which has developed a concept of "Wikiquette" in response.

Supporter arguments for why this may not occur include that Wikipedia encourages creative collaboration by allowing people to edit other people's work, that Wikipedia has the possibility of enforcing community-agreed standards, and that Wikipedia has the specific goal of producing an encyclopedia.

Fanatics and special interests

Several contributors have complained that editing Wikipedia is very tedious in the case of conflicts and that sufficiently dedicated contributors with idiosyncratic beliefs can push their point of view, because nobody has the time and energy to counteract the bias. Some contributors have alleged that informal Wikipedia coalitions work regularly to push and to suppress certain points of view. For example, they often allege that certain pages have been taken over by fanatics and special interest groups that consistently revert the contributions of new contributors. This problem tends to occur most around controversial subjects, and sometimes results in revert wars and pages being locked down. In response, an Arbitration Committee has been formed on the English Wikipedia that deals with the worst offenders — though a conflict resolution strategy is actively encouraged before going to this extent. Also, to stop the continuous reverting of pages, Jimbo Wales introduced a "three revert rule", whereby those users who revert an article more than three times in a 24 hour period are blocked for 24 hours.

Censorship

Some argue that criticisms are systematically excluded, deleted or reverted by self-appointed censors, and that even attempts to make compromises or build up articles to include a variety of views are thwarted by uncompromising vandal-editors who simply delete or revert unwanted views that don't fit their agenda. According to Wikipedia's documentation, opposing views should ideally be included in some way, and editors are encouraged to edit text instead of reverting; however Wikipedia has no way of enforcing such a policy.

Supporters of Wikipedia generally say that this claim is usually made by those who wish to add false, irrelevant, or non-notable information to articles. Leaning in the other direction also leads to possible criticisms. Encyclopedia articles should stick to the topic at hand and should never compromise on fact, and Wikipedia's requirement for diplomacy creates a pressure on the article towards pleasing the most contributors, rather than being correct and concise. This makes it even less authoritative and more convoluted, often to the point of an article not being self-consistent.

See also

References

This article incorporates text from the GFDL Wikipedia article Wikipedia:Replies to common objections.

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