SkaroffBlog

The world’s largest encyclopedia, and one of my favorite online resources, Wikipedia, has been in the news a lot recently. The first issue of note was the recent edit war over the Swiftboating entry with bloggers on both the left and right side of the aisle unleashing their readers on the page. Next came an apparent attempt by Adam Curry, the former MTV VJ and one of the internet’s first podcasters, to alter the Podcasting article to bolster his credentials as the father of podcasting by removing some mentions of previous work in the field by others. And then came the controversy over an article that falsely implicated author John Seigenthaler Sr. in the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and his former boss, Robert Kennedy. Seigenthaler fired back at the anonymous editor and Wikipedia as an organization in a USA Today Op-Ed.

These issues prompted Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales to change the rules that govern editing on the open source encyclopedia. While anyone can still alter an article, now only registered users are allowed to create new entries. All these problems, combined with criticism from many writers and established encyclopedia institutions have not dampened enthusiasm for the service, and a new study, along with one done by IBM that showed the median time for page vandalism to be fixed was only 5 minutes, further strengthen the legitimacy of the open source encyclopedia model.

Researchers at the British journal Nature examined scientific entries on Wikipedia and the Encyclopedia Britannica and compared them for accuracy:

The reviewers were asked to check for errors, but were not told about the source of the information.

“Only eight serious errors, such as misinterpretations of important concepts, were detected in the pairs of articles reviewed, four from each encyclopedia,” reported Nature.

“But reviewers also found many factual errors, omissions or misleading statements: 162 and 123 in Wikipedia and Britannica, respectively.”

Wikipedia is not perfect, as this study shows, but neither is any other source of information. The simple fact is that the open source model works, and seems to work remarkably well. Content will be created, shared, commented on, and remixed and altered by anyone and everyone. The sooner the elites from the science, journalism, entertainment and music industries wake up and realize that they must relinquish their oppresive grip on content, the better.

Want to see what thousands of random people can do? Check out SwarmSketch, a “Collective sketching of the collective consciousness.”

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 15th, 2005 at 2:45 pm and is tagged as Internet, News, Tech, Web_2.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.