Is Wikipedia's real problem really that it's become un-"cool"?

by Ken

So Wikipedia has troubles.

No, founder Jimmy Wales isn't talking about passing the hat, at least not just now. He told the AP Thursday ("Wikipedia Says It's Losing Contributors"), during the website's annual conference in Haifa ("attended by some 650 Wikipedia contributors and enthusiasts from 56 countries," including "contributors . . . from Venezuela and Indonesia, though neither country has diplomatic relations with Israel"):"We are not replenishing our ranks. It is not a crisis, but I consider it to be important."

Administrators of the Internet's fifth most visited website are working to simplify the way users can contribute and edit material. "A lot of it is convoluted," Wales said. "A lot of editorial guidelines ... are impenetrable to new users."

Wikipedia has more than 3 million entries but has been marred by subjective entries and pranks. Even so, Wikipedia cites studies that compare the website's accuracy favorably to more conventional encyclopedias, while other studies give it lower marks.

Despite Wikipedia's wide-reaching popularity, Wales said the typical profile of a contributor is "a 26-year-old geeky male" who moves on to other ventures, gets married and leaves the website. Other contributors leave because, 10 years after the website was launched, there are fewer new entries to add, he said.

By March, Wikipedia had about 90,000 active contributors. The goal is to tack on another 5,000 by June of next year, said Sue Gardner, executive director of the nonprofit that runs the website.

Among its steps, Gardner said the nonprofit is expanding a program that encourages university professors to assign the writing of Wikipedia entries to their students, particularly in India, Brazil, Canada, Germany and Britain.

And the kids at Gawker are buying it. Adrian Chen writes, in "Wikipedia Is Slowly Dying":

Wikipedia needs to get cool again, somehow. When Wikipedia launched in the early naughts it was attractively subversive -- it pissed off your teachers, journalists and any square over 40, basically. Idealistic young nerds flocked to the site with that early web 2.0 communitarian fervor. But new editors aren't showing up at the same rate. After years at the top result on practically every Google search, Wikipedia has lost its urgency. Kids who were in 8th grade in 2004 have gone through their entire high school and college careers consulting (i.e. plagiarizing) Wikipedia; to them, Wikipedia is a dull black box—editing it seems just a bit more possible than making revisions to Pride and Prejudice.

And Twitter and Facebook have sucked up all the cognitive surplus younger internet users might have once devoted to building up Wikipedia and shattered it into a million fleeting hashtags. Wikipedia should try to somehow harness the new fickle hive mind: Remember when hordes of Beliebers descended on Esperanza Spalding's Wikipedia page and ravaged it after she beat out Justin Bieber for the Grammy? All you've got to do is get 15-year-old girls as interested in, say, Princess Alexandra of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha. Good luck with that, Jimmy Wales!

But maybe Wikipedia's inscrutable "editorial" policies and procedures raise problems other than the interest level of 15-year-olds. Our friend Dave Johnson, one of the sanest as well as smartest people we know, calls attention to a post he wrote for HuffPost in March 2009: "Watch Out for Wikipedia."

Try this: start or edit a Wikipedia article that includes information that might be unfavorable to conservative corporate interests, perhaps in the area of tort reform (incl medical malpractice, etc) or trade/protectionism, etc. Try adding citations to studies that show that tort reform is a corporate-funded effort to keep people from being able to sue companies that harm them... I tried it and it was removed in a few minutes. . . .

Try editing entries covering other issues around trade, economics or corporate issues. See how long it takes before a pro-corporate viewpoint is returned to the article. Or add an article about a progressive organization. I added an article about the Commonweal Institute, and it was immediately removed, so I put another up and it was immediately flagged for removal. (I am working to save it...) An article about me -- put up and edited by others -- was also removed twice. The circumstances involved a professional "leading tort-reform advocate" -- while I'm the person who wrote this report about how the tort reform movement is involved with the corporate/conservative movement. Go figure.

The lesson, clearly, is that there are cadres of right-wing zealots, possibly on someone's payroll, standing "guard" over Wikipedia, pumping it as full as they can get away with with their lies and delusions and making sure that any contrary truths are whipsawed. ("I know of one corporate-funded conservative movement insider who spends much of the normal workday and evenings editing Wikipedia," Dave wrote.)

So it seems the Wikipedia organization may be unable to sufficiently police the site to keep this from happening, and to keep new people from having unpleasant experiences and being shouted down and driven away. There are so many areas of political life where conservatives shout down or intimidate everyone else until they give up and go away. Wikipedia is fast becoming one more.

This has real-world implications. Wikipedia shows up at the top of many if not most Google searches, and people tend to believe this means it is a reliable source. This positioning implies a public-interest responsibility for accuracy and objective presentation of material. On non-controversial topics Wikipedia is a very reliable and possibly the best source for information because over time the "wisdom of crowds" effect brings increased expertise to bear.

But like so many things today, in areas where corporate resources can be focused, the subject matter increasingly reflects the viewpoint that serves the interests of the few at the top. Wikipedia's prominence is the likely reason this conservative information-purging occurs. It is also the reason Wikipedia has a responsibility to do something about it.

Would you guess that the situation has gotten better since 2009? I tend to use Wikipedia mostly for those "non-controversial topics," but even I notice that anytime there's material that could be interpreted as not calculated to gladden the heart of a right-wing zealot, there's controversy -- and that doesn't include situations where there's no visible controversy, where the right-wing moles have calmly and quietly performed their surgeries.

By the way, I found the cartoon at the top of this post (by Wilcox for Australia's The Age, apropos of a scandal in which the Australian PM's office and cabinet were caught scrubbing Wikipedia entries) from a post on the Brisbane Grammar School Library website, "10 Reasons Not to Use Wikipedia for Assignments."

10 good reasons why you should never trust Wikipedia as an accurate source of information:
10. You must never fully rely on any one source for important information

9. You especially can’t rely on something when you don’t even know who wrote it

8. The contributor with an agenda often prevails

7. Individuals with agendas sometimes have significant editing authority

6. Sometimes “vandals” create malicious entries that go uncorrected for month

5. There is little diversity among editors

4. The number of active Wikipedia editors has flat-lined

3. It has become harder for casual participants to contribute

2. Accurate contributors can be silenced

And the number one reason:

1. It says so on Wikipedia

"Wikipedia says, "We do not expect you to trust us." It adds that it is “not a primary source” and that “because some articles may contain errors,” you should “not use Wikipedia to make critical decisions.”

Furthermore, Wikipedia notes in its “About” section, “Users should be aware that not all articles are of encyclopedic quality from the start: they may contain false or debatable information.”

#