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Criticism of Wikipedia

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In Wikipedia, see Wikipedia:Criticisms, Wikipedia:Why Wikipedia is not so great, and Wikipedia:Replies to common objections.

Criticism of Wikipedia has increased with its prominence. Critics of Wikipedia include Wikipedia editors themselves, ex-editors, representatives of other encyclopedias, and even subjects of the articles. 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).

Some critics have claimed that while Wikipedia may be a useful information resource, it errs when it bills itself as an encyclopedia--as this word properly implies a level of authority and accountability that an openly-editable reference work allegedly cannot possess. Frequent Wikipedia critic Andrew Orlowski writes [1]:

... If what we today know as "Wikipedia" had started life as something called, let's say - "Jimbo's Big Bag O'Trivia" - we doubt if it would be the problem it has become. Wikipedia is indeed, as its supporters claim, a phenomenal source of pop culture trivia. Maybe a "Big Bag O'Trivia" is all Jimbo ever wanted. Maybe not.
For sure a libel is a libel, but the outrage would have been far more muted if the Wikipedia project didn't make such grand claims for itself. The problem with this vanity exercise is one that it's largely created for itself. The public has a firm idea of what an "encyclopedia" is, and it's a place where information can generally be trusted, or at least slightly more trusted than what a labyrinthine, mysterious bureaucracy can agree upon, and surely more trustworthy than a piece of spontaneous graffiti - and Wikipedia is a king-sized cocktail of the two.

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.

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 source of information. 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.

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.

This particular criticism is Wikipedia's most frequently encountered weakness in reality. Sometimes, the subject of a biographical article must fix blatant lies about his own life. [2] A nihilartikel was once inserted into Wikipedia that lasted for five months. [3]

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).

Exposure to vandals

In 2005, Wikipedia received a great deal of bad publicity as a result of the John Seigenthaler Sr. Wikipedia biography controversy, in which a (then) unknown vandal created a biographical page on Seigenthaler containing numerous false and defamatory statements; this page went unnoticed for several months until discovered by Seigenthaler himself. Likewise, numerous other pages have been attacked and defaced by vandals; either with axes to grind against a particular subject (then defamed or unfairly and unencyclopedically criticized in a Wikipedia article); or against Wikipedia itself. There have even been instances of Wikipedia critics injecting false information into Wikipedia in order to "test" the system and demonstrate its alleged unreliability.

Wikipedia has numerous tools available to editors (and several more available only to administrators) in order to combat vandalism; proponents of the encyclopedia argue that the vast majority of attacks on Wikipedia are detected and reverted within a short time frame. (One study by IBM found that most vandalism on Wikipedia is reverted in about 5 minutes [4]). Notwithstanding such assurances, there have been several incidents where defamatory, unsubstantiated, or manifestly untrue claims have persisted in current versions of Wikipedia articles for significant amounts of time, the Seigenthaler incident being the most prominent such incident to date.

It should be noted that such postings violate numerous Wikipedia policies, most importantly Wikipedia's policy on verifiability.

Privacy concerns

Most "privacy concerns" refer to cases of government or employer data gathering; or to computer or electronic monitoring; or to trading data between organizations. See LEGAL ISSUES IN EMPLOYEE PRIVACY for example. The concern in the case of Wikipedia is the right of a private citizen to remain private; to not move from being a "private citizen" to being a "public figure" in the eyes of the law (see [5] for the legal distinction). It is somewhat of a battle between to right be anonymous in cyberspace and the right be anonymous in real life (meatspace).

"[T]he Internet has created conflicts between personal privacy, commercial interests and the interests of society at large" warns James Donnelly and Jenifer Haeckl in PRIVACY AND SECURITY ON THE INTERNET: What Rights, What Remedies?.

Daniel Brandt's Wikipedia Watch states "Wikipedia is a potential menace to anyone who values privacy. [...] A greater degree of accountability in the Wikipedia structure, as discussed above, would also be the very first step toward resolving the privacy problem." In trying to assert his own right to real life privacy he wishes to end the cyberspace privacy of editors on Wikipedia.

Balancing the rights of all concerned as technology alters the social landscape will not be easy. It "is not yet possible to anticipate the path of the common law or governmental regulation" regarding this problem. [6].

See Wikipedia policy on the privacy of contributors.

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.

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 it can be difficult for this policy to be enforced.

See also

In Wikipedia, see Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2005-10-31/Guardian_rates_articles.

References

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

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