[Web4lib] The Wikipedia Gotcha

[Binkley, Peter]

While you don't know the real identity of the administrators and
contributors to Wikipedia, you do know their online identities, and they
are putting their reputations on the line within that community in a way
that many of them feel is just as real as traditional authorship. (Not,
perhaps, to the highest standards of peer-reviewed original scholarship,
but that's not what encyclopaedias are for).  

The social norms that make the reputations of editors and institutions a
guarantor of probity took centuries to evolve, in an environment
dominated by print technology; now that evolutionary process has to
adapt to a new environment. That we'll end up with a new animal
descended from traditional concepts of authority is inevitable, not
worth arguing about. It's the shape of that new animal that's
interesting, and manifestations of the social web like Wikipedia are
starting to show us where it might be going.

Peter

Peter Binkley
Digital Initiatives Technology Librarian
Information Technology Services
4-30 Cameron Library
University of Alberta Libraries
Edmonton, Alberta
Canada T6G 2J8
Phone: (780) 492-3743
Fax: (780) 492-9243
e-mail: peter.binkley at ualberta.ca



-----Original Message-----
From: web4lib-bounces at webjunction.org
[mailto:web4lib-bounces at webjunction.org] On Behalf Of Roy Tennant
Sent: Wednesday, February 21, 2007 8:35 AM
To: web4lib at webjunction.org
Subject: Re: [Web4lib] The Wikipedia Gotcha

On 2/21/07 4:45 AM, "Rob Styles" <Rob.Styles at talis.com> wrote:

> Let's also consider though how the two systems - journals and 
> Wikipedia
> - handle failures in the integrity of the work.

Yes, by all means, lets. One aspect of this is knowing who is doing the
vetting. With a standard journal, there is a masthead which identifies
the editor, editorial board, and others involved in the production of
(and therefore are responsible for) the contents of the publication.
Typically this includes their organizational affiliation. They are, in a
very real sense, putting their reputations and the reputations of their
institutions on the line that what appears in the journal is worthy to
appear there (note that I did not stay "true" since anyone who knows the
first thing about the history of science knows that this is a slippery
commodity).

Meanwhile, good luck with knowing who stands behind Wikipedia. Sure, you
have Jimmy Wales but from there things get foggy fast. There are well
over a thousand people with administrator rights on the site with
privileges to dump your contributions, lock the page, etc. Finding out
who these people are and what their credentials are is a hit or miss
activity.

For example, administrator "1ne" has a number of deletions, user blocks,
contributions, and other edits to his or her credit, but there is no way
to find out who this person is. Administrator "23skidoo" is a
self-proclaimed "trivia fanatic". Administrator "BigDT" has a photo
gallery, "general thoughts", and college football news on his/her user
page, but not much else. Oh, and the page for administrator "C12H22O11"
simply displays the chemical diagram for sucrose. Nice.

So yes, Rob is correct that web-based information (whether Wikipedia
articles or peer-reviewed journal articles) can be corrected in a way
that print cannot. But there are many dimensions to integrity.
Roy

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