[Web4lib] The Wikipedia Gotcha

[Jakob Voss]

Richard Wiggins wrote:

> What that episode caused me to realize is this:
> 
> -- Since anyone can publish an article on any topic, the Wikipedia corpus
> will grow ad infinitum.  By contrast, a print encyclopedia has a budget,
> and articles on very obscure topics won't get published.  The Britannica
> will never offer a long tail of very obscure articles.

There is also a lot of nonsense and obscure topics published in books
and journal articles. So should we blame the "book and journal corpus"?
The error lies in pointing to Wikipedia as an authority - that's like
telling "I read it in a book" or "a friend told me".

> -- An article on an obscure topic won't be checked, and will live to be
> cited as authority someday when finally someone stumbles on it.

If it will be cited as an authority then there was probably no better
reliable, accesible, and comprehensible source to cite. The problem is
not Wikipedia but lack of open access and transparent science in this
obscure topic.

> -- Therefore, where Wikipedia fails is in the long tail. And it will have
> an ever-growing, ever-longer tail of falsehood.

Yes there will always be errors in Wikipedia but I am not sure whether
it really growths. Maybe it's the case in English Wikipedia where Ninja
Turtles get their own articles and uncited single sentences are marked
as "article stub" instead of deleting it, but there are other languages
where quality is valued more than quantity.

By the way there are also standards of quality in Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability


Alain D. M. G. Vaillancourt wrote:

> Gentlemen (and ladies) we are not dealing with a mammal here, but with
> a giant amoeba, with no easily discernible head or tail and with a
> rich symbiotic mass of life within its body.  It's a social animal,
> but not the kind who's going to lick your fingers when you come home
> or go into the barn.

Thanks for this wonderful quote!

and:

> My best source of fun in the latter comes from a study that came out
> as an article titled "'Memex' as an image of potentiality in
> information retrieval research and development" by Linda C. Smith.  In
> her study Linda C. Smith showed, by a thorough analysis of those
> articles which cited Vannevar Bush's 1945 "As We May Think" article,
> that shcolars quoted what they wanted in order to prove what they
> wanted regardless of the original intent of the author, Vannevar Bush
> and the presence of contradictory statments in other places in the
> text.

I included this information in the German Wikipedia article on Citation:
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zitation#Quellen

Frankly speaking I have not read Linda's article. So am I a bad
Wikipedia editor? Do I add falsehood to Wikipedia? Will readers trust
Wikipedia because they trust me as a Wikipedia editor and I trust you
you and you trust Linda and Linda trusts her own research?

Greetings,
Jakob Voss

P.S: People would like to have a reliable leader they can blindly trust
in aspect. Wikipedia does not even pretent to be such a guide! There are
warning signs, you should know that everyone can edit etc. - but people
still want it to be an omniscient source - maybe thinking and
uncertainty is just too uncomfortable?