San Francisco — The world’s largest and most popular online encyclopedia is changing the way knowledge is disseminated and used, but not without objections.Wikipedia, launched in 2001, ranks among the top 10 most-frequented sites and boasts more than 13 million articles in 250 languages as of September.
Jay Walsh, spokesman for the Wikimedia Foundation, Wikipedia’s parent organization, said the online reference source owes its success to the fact that it is the first living encyclopedia. Its content is in constant flux as anonymous volunteers write new articles and edit, often repeatedly, many of the existing ones. Some topical articles are updated in nearly real time, often by hundreds of people, to reflect ongoing developments. That is why many new entries related to the 2008 U.S. elections met with great interest immediately after they had been posted, according to Walsh.
He said not-for-profit organizations were among the first to see the benefits of the online encyclopedia. Being able to educate themselves quickly about a variety of issues and locations, “has changed the way they tactically approach different issues and situations,” he said.
Wikipedia also is sneaking into mainstream media and college classrooms. Some argue that the sheer magnitude of information, its accessibility and frequent updates make it potentially useful to journalists and students who work under time pressure.
However, most newspapers and magazines and many universities have kept their distance from the encyclopedia; they ban attributions to it or citations from it because they consider it unreliable. Phillip Blanchard, a Washington Post copy editor, calls it “junk.” But other editors and writers use it as a source guide or a road map to more reliable sources.
Wikipedia itself acknowledges that its articles are not always complete or accurate, although, it says, it constantly works to increase the accuracy of information, prevent editorial vandalism and delete the least-trusted entries.
Walsh said that Wikipedia has some ground rules. It excludes original research and depends instead on reliable published sources, and its articles must present a neutral point of view. Those principles have been vigorously enforced by contributors and registered editors, who correct or remove errors from articles sometimes within hours of their publication, he said.
College students have been much quicker to embrace Wikipedia than have journalists. But many professors refuse to allow students to cite it in their papers.
Sharman Lichtenstein, an associate professor at Deakin University in Australia, told the online magazine Techworld Australia that the reliance by students on Wikipedia as a primary source for research is “crowding out” valuable knowledge and creating a generation unable to source views of “credible experts.”
But Wikipedia has found defenders in academia. For example, some Harvard professors and teaching fellows incorporate it into their syllabi. They argue that some Wikipedia articles are extremely useful, according to the Harvard Crimson, a Harvard University daily publication.
Scholars who distrust Wikipedia often say it is because the site is error-prone and devalues the notion of expertise by relying on “amateurs.”
But that perception may not be entirely true. A 2005 study by the science journal Nature concluded that Wikipedia, at that time, came close to the Encyclopedia Britannica in the accuracy of its science entries. And the late Roy Rosenzweig, who was a history professor at George Mason University, found that Wikipedia’s coverage of history was almost as factually accurate as Microsoft Corporation’s commercial online encyclopedia, Encarta.
Cathy Davidson, a professor at Duke University, cited in a 2008 American Journalism Review article, suggests that the media and academia distrust Wikipedia because they have not yet figured out how to use the Internet to their advantage.
Walsh said that Wikipedia has been trying to encourage scholars to contribute to the encyclopedia to improve its quality, an effort that so far has not produced many recruits. Scholars who hone their expertise do not have much time for writing for an encyclopedia that does not bring them recognition, he said. And experts who contribute to Wikipedia often do not advertise themselves as experts, he added.
Leaders of Wikipedia want to preserve the unique, democratic character of the encyclopedia to which anyone — expert or not — can contribute. Wikipedia welcomes more professors, as long as they do not denigrate other contributors, Jimmy Wales, the online encyclopedia’s co-founder, told the Chronicle of Higher Education.
Two other online encyclopedias compete directly with Wikipedia — Citizendium, started by Larry Sanger, a co-founder of Wikipedia, and Knol, launched by Google. Both rely on experts and expert editors rather than knowledgeable enthusiasts.
But Wikipedians, as contributors to Wikipedia call themselves, believe that the strength of an encyclopedia derives from its reliance on the knowledge of many rather than that of a selected few. And they may be right, says Gregory Crane, editor-in-chief of the Perseus Digital Library at Tufts University. In a 2005 article, he said the Oxford English Dictionary was written over a period of 70 years by thousands of people, including “an inmate at an asylum for [the] criminally insane.”
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