Let me try to quickly adapt one of my old user space essays to provide an annotated list of some of the best critical examinations of the Wikipedia which had appeared through the Fall of 2006 (other valuable essays have appeared since then, of course).
My original list ran to 90,000 characters and the BAUT limit is only 15,000 so I'll have to spread this version over multiple posts and even then I'll have to truncate it.
Please note that all quotations are attributed to their original source, with links to the on-line version, and that I can and do claim "fair use" for quotations of modest length from the essays of these authors.
Summary
After some struggle, I believe one can extract from the following links and from my own essays a number of common conclusions:
1. A stunningly naive cornerstone of the Wiki Faith states that
"wiki pages will be naturally attracted to a state of perfection"; this conviction has proven to be utterly contrafactual, but continues to be regularly repeated by people who ought to know better,
2. This overlooks not only Wikipedia's absurdly cumbersome procedures for dealing with vandalism, hoaxes, POV-pushing, guerrilla marketing, and other malicious edits, but also an important phenomenon which I call ''edit creep'': over time, an article will tend to degraded by edits by inexperienced or careless writers who are unaccustomed to thinking about considerations of
a. organization,
b. balance (the relative weight given to different subtopics),
c. style,
d. consistentency of paragraph structure, verb tense, spelling, notation and terminology,
3. Wikipedia policies and other "official" statements completely fail to stress some essential points:
a. every encyclopedia exists to
serve its readers,
b. the editors serve the readers not by merely
compiling information, but by
evaluating, screening, sorting, organizing, and summarizing information in a concise and coherent fashion,
4. Wikipedia's notorious instability (an excellent article as of this minute may be vandalized or munged by a well-meaning incompetent in the next few minutes) is distracting, disorienting, and does not serve the reader well,
5. Wikipedia's unstructured collaborative writing process tends to
suppress many elements of good writing, such as character, style, wit, and even values,
6. As such, Wikipedia actually tends to promote a global trend toward
erasing individual expression; this is highly inimical toward the freedom of expression that many Americans cherish,
7. Wikipedia appears to ignore not only the needs of its own readers but also appears
hostile toward its most expert contributors, an attitude which is particularly self-defeating when it comes to highly technical topics in science and mathematics,
8. Wikipedia's encouragement of anonymous editing and tolerance of sockpuppetry discourages contributors from taking intellectual responsibility for their contributions, or even for assuming any individual responsibility whatever for their behavior at this website, with predictable results: rampant
a. vandalism,
b. hoaxery,
c. wikishilling,
d. guerilla marketing,
e. POV-pushing,
f. political dirty-trickery,
g. incivility,
9. Wikipedia and Google are excellent at
compiling information but absolutely dreadful at
evaluating information; they render the
finding of information so easy that the time consuming and intellectually far more demanding task of
evaluating what one has found increasingly seems too onerous to be worth the trouble,
10. By failing so badly at the filtering and evaluation of information,
Wikipedia is failing miserably in its primary mission as an encyclopedia,
11. Far from
getting good information to the people, paradoxically enough, the ultimate effect of Wikipedia may actually be to
impede the filtering/evaluation of raw information by students, teachers, reference librarians, journalists, other information brokers, policy makers, and even by academics--- which would be an extremely dangerous development, highly inimical to the best interests of a free society,
12. By failing to state an unambiguous and self-consistent mission for Wikipedia, and to promulgate effective policies which further that mission,
the Wikipedia leadership has failed to lead.
Larry Sanger
Larry Sanger was once the father of Wikipedia (a title disputed by Jimmy Wales), but he is remembered at Wikipedia as the apostate who departed to found an alternative on-line encyclopedia project, Citizendium.
As such, he is one of the most knowledgeable critics of Wikipedia from both an internal and an external perspective. As you would guess from some of the terms he uses, he is a philosopher by training.
"The epistemology of Wikipedia", by Larry Sanger, WikiMedia Meta-wiki, c. 2001
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/The_e...y_of_Wikipedia
In this memorandum, Sanger challenges a core precept of the Wiki Faith: the notion that a wiki article will be naturally attracted to perfection. He asks: ''"Is there anything about the Wikipedia process by itself, unaided by an approval process, that tends to the overall improvement of the reliability of the articles?"''
"Wikipedia and why it matters", by Larry Sanger, WikiMedia Meta-wiki, January 2002
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikip...why_it_matters
This is the text of a talk delivered to the ''Stanford University Computer Systems Laboratory EE380 Colloquium'', on January 16, 2002.
Quote:
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Wikipedia is an excellent example of a new kind of website: a radically collaborative, truly open website, that actually produces content that the general public might want to read...The Wikipedia project is self-consciously an encyclopedia--rather than a dictionary, discussion forum, web portal, etc.--or even just a typical wiki... there is a bit of a tension between the facts that Wikipedia is an encyclopedia project and that it is a wiki. When people arrive at the website and see that they can edit any page, and that there is little central oversight, it is immediately evident that Wikipedia is an encyclopedia only because we decided to make it one. The website, when we first set it up, was just a blank slate. It required myself and some other people to declare, "We're making an encyclopedia here on this wiki"--we had to make that declaration repeatedly in order for people to know that indeed, we wanted to make an encyclopedia. We could have instead made a poetry forum, a dictionary, or a chat area. But we didn't want to. We wanted it to become an encyclopedia, and that is what it has become...How can we respect the credibility of a project to which any anonymous user can drop any string of characters onto a Wikipedia page?...The short answer... is that we are constantly editing each others' work via the same process that makes easy article creation possible in the first place--and this turns out to be a reasonably powerful, though far from perfect, review process in itself.
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(To judge from his later writings, Sanger seems to have since largely abandoned these high hopes for Wikipedia.)
A particularly interesting passage describes a dangerous feedback loop:
Quote:
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We believe that we are, happily, in a positive feedback loop with Google, as follows. We write a thousand articles; Google spiders them and sends some traffic to those pages. Some small percentage of that traffic becomes Wikipedia contributors, increasing our contributor base. The enlarged contributor base then writes another two thousand articles, which Google dutifully spiders, and then we receive an even larger influx of traffic. All the while, no doubt in part due to links to our articles from Google, an increasing number of other websites link to Wikipedia, increasing the standing of Wikipedia pages in Google results.
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The reason why such feedback is so insiduous is because this phenomenon has been explicitly recognized (see below) by cranks and guerrilla marketeers as forming the basis of a method for manipulating Google to sell your product (intellectual or commercial, metaphorically or literally).
"Why Wikipedia Must Jettison Its Anti-Elitism", by Larry Sanger, Kuro5hin, 30 December 2005
http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2004/12/30/142458/25
Quote:
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Wikipedia is better described as one of those sources regarded as unreliable which people read anyway...The root problem: anti-elitism, or lack of respect for expertise...As a community, Wikipedia lacks the habit or tradition of respect for expertise. As a community, ... it is anti-elitist (which, in this context, means that expertise is not accorded any special respect, and snubs and disrespect of expertise is tolerated)... One thing that Wikipedia could do now, although I doubt that it is possible in the current atmosphere and with the current management, is to adopt an official policy of respect of and deference to expertise. Wikipedia's "key policies" have not changed since I was associated with the project; but if a policy of respect of and deference to expertise were adopted at that level, and if it were enforced somehow, perhaps the project would solve the problems described above. But don't hold your breath. Unless there is the equivalent of a revolution in the ranks of Wikipedia, the project will not adopt this sort of policy and make it a "key policy"; or if it does, the policy will probably be not be enforced. I certainly do not expect Jimmy Wales to change his mind. I have known him since 1994 and he is a smart and thoughtful guy; I am sure he has thought through his support of radical openness and his (what I call) anti-elitism. I doubt he will change his mind about these things. And unless he does change his mind, the project itself will probably not change.
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Sanger continues to comment about Wikipedia from time to time in the Citizendium blog.
(To be continued...)