Criticism of Wikipedia

Criticism of Wikipedia, a free content encyclopedia project written collaboratively by volunteers, has increased along with its size and popularity. Notable criticisms include that its open nature makes it unauthoritative and unreliable, that it exhibits systemic bias, and that its group dynamics hinder its goals.

Criticism of the concept

The Wiki model

Wikipedia has been both praised and criticized for being open to editing by anyone. Critics claim that non-expert editing undermines quality, and that the project lacks authority. Larry Sanger, who played a key role in the founding of Wikipedia but left the project in 2002, criticized Wikipedia in late 2004 for having an "anti-elitist" philosophy of active contempt for expertise. Some librarians, academics, and editors of other encyclopedias consider it to have little utility as a reference work. Some university lecturers discourage students from citing any encyclopedia in academic work, preferring primary sources. One university program and several schools (including Cranbrook School Sydney) have even banned Wikipedia citations specifically.

Rather than relying on the personal authority of credentialed experts, Wikipedia's policies state that assertions should be supported by reliable, published sources—ideally, by peer reviewed publications. Jimmy Wales, the de facto leader of Wikipedia, stresses that encyclopedias of any type are not usually appropriate as primary sources, and should not be relied upon as authoritative. In a 2005 study, Emigh and Herring note that there are not yet many formal studies of Wikipedia or its model, and suggest that Wikipedia achieves its results by social means—self-norming, a core of active users watching for problems, and expectations of encyclopedic text drawn from the wider culture.

Usefulness as a reference

Wikipedia acknowledges that it should not be used as a primary source for serious research. Still, the lack of authority, accountability, and peer review have all been sources of criticism. For example, librarian Philip Bradley acknowledged in an October 2004 interview with The Guardian that the concept behind the site was in theory a "lovely idea," but that he would not use it in practice, and that he is "not aware of a single librarian who would. The main problem is the lack of authority. With printed publications, the publishers have to ensure that their data is reliable, as their livelihood depends on it. But with something like this, all that goes out the window."

Likewise, Robert McHenry, former editor-in-chief of Encyclopædia Britannica said in November 2004:

"The user who visits Wikipedia to learn about some subject, to confirm some matter of fact, is rather in the position of a visitor to a public restroom. It may be obviously dirty, so that he knows to exercise great care, or it may seem fairly clean, so that he may be lulled into a false sense of security. What he certainly does not know is who has used the facilities before him."

Discover magazine noted in its March 2006 issue that "science entries in Wikipedia, the open-source online encyclopedia that anyone can edit, are nearly as error-free as those in Encyclopædia Britannica, according to a team of expert reviewers." This figure comes from the comparative study performed by science journal Nature a few months prior. The study performed in Nature has not been without criticism. For example, Andrew Orlowski wrote an editorial for The Register which claims,

"…Nature sent only misleading fragments of some Britannica articles to the reviewers, sent extracts of the children's version and Britannica's 'book of the year' to others, and in one case, simply stitched together bits from different articles and inserted its own material, passing it off as a single Britannica entry."

Nature disputes these claims.

Wall Street Journal debate

In the 2006-09-12 edition of the Wall Street Journal, Jimmy Wales debated with Dale Hoiberg, editor-in-chief of Encyclopedia Britannica. Hoiberg focused on a need for expertise and control in an encyclopedia and cited Lewis Mumford that overwhelming information could “bring about a state of intellectual enervation and depletion hardly to be distinguished from massive ignorance.”

Wales emphasized Wikipedia's differences, and asserted that openness and transparency lead to quality. Hoiberg claimed that he “had neither the time nor space to respond to [criticisms]” and “could corral any number of links to articles alleging errors in Wikipedia,” to which Wales responded: “No problem! Wikipedia to the rescue with a fine article,” and included a link to Criticism of Wikipedia (this article).

Suitability as an encyclopedia

Critics such as Robert McHenry have said that Wikipedia errs in billing itself as an encyclopedia, because that word implies a level of authority and accountability that they believe cannot be possessed by an openly editable reference. McHenry argues that

"to the ordinary user, the turmoil and uncertainty that may lurk beneath the surface of a Wikipedia article are invisible. He or she arrives at a Wikipedia article via Google, perhaps, and sees that it is part of what claims to be an "encyclopedia". This is a word that carries a powerful connotation of reliability. The typical user doesn't know how conventional encyclopedias achieve reliability, only that they do."

Frequent Wikipedia critic Andrew Orlowski writes:

"If what we today know as 'Wikipedia' had started life as something called, let's say — 'Jimbo's Big Bag O'Trivia' — we doubt if it would be the problem it has become. Wikipedia is indeed, as its supporters claim, a phenomenal source of pop culture trivia. Maybe a 'Big Bag O'Trivia' is all Jimbo ever wanted. Maybe not.

"For sure a libel is a libel, but the outrage would have been far more muted if the Wikipedia project didn't make such grand claims for itself. The problem with this vanity exercise is one that it's largely created for itself. The public has a firm idea of what an 'encyclopedia' is, and it's a place where information can generally be trusted, or at least slightly more trusted than what a labyrinthine, mysterious bureaucracy can agree upon, and surely more trustworthy than a piece of spontaneous graffiti — and Wikipedia is a king-sized cocktail of the two."

Jerry Holkins of Penny Arcade noted in an essay accompanying an online webcomic that a

"response [to criticisms of Wikipedia] is: the collaborative nature of the apparatus means that the right data tends to emerge, ultimately, even if there is turmoil temporarily as dichotomous viewpoints violently intersect."

However, Holkins is merely restating others' defenses here; in fact, Holkins derides this view as

"propos[ing] a kind of quantum encyclopedia, where genuine data both exists and doesn't exist depending on the precise moment I rely upon your discordant fucking mob for my information."

A number of academics have criticized Wikipedia for its perceived failure as a reliable source. Many Wikipedia editors do not have degrees or other credentials generally recognized in academia. The use of Wikipedia is not accepted in many schools and universities in writing a formal paper. Several educational institutions have blocked Wikipedia in the past while others have limited its use to only a pointer to external sources. University of Maryland professor of physics Robert L. Park has characterized Wikipedia as a target for "purveyors of pseudoscience."

Academic circles have not been entirely dismissive of Wikipedia as a source of information. Wikipedia articles have been referenced in "enhanced perspectives" provided on-line in the journal Science. The first of these perspectives to provide a hyperlink to Wikipedia was "A White Collar Protein Senses Blue Light," and dozens of enhanced perspectives have provided such links since then. However, these links are offered as background sources for the reader, not as sources used by the writer, and the "enhanced perspectives" are not intended to serve as reference material themselves.

Anti-elitism as a weakness

Former editor-in-chief of Nupedia, Larry Sanger, stated in an opinion piece in Kuro5hin that "anti-elitism" — active contempt for expertise — was rampant among Wikipedia editors and supporters. He further stated that "far too much credence and respect [is] accorded to people who in other Internet contexts would be labeled 'trolls'." This sort of sentiment is more commonly known as anti-intellectualism.

Jimmy Wales, de-facto leader of the project, admits that wide variations in quality between different articles and topics is not insignificant, but that he considers the average quality to be "pretty good," getting better by the day.

Staff at the Encyclopædia Britannica say it does not feel threatened by Wikipedia. "The premise of Wikipedia is that continuous improvement will lead to perfection; that premise is completely unproven," the reference work's executive editor, Ted Pappas, told The Guardian.

Systemic bias in coverage

Wikipedia has been accused of systemic bias, a tendency to cover topics in a detail disproportionate to their importance. Even the site's proponents admit to this flaw. In an interview with The Guardian, Dale Hoiberg, the editor-in-chief of Encyclopædia Britannica, noted that

"people write of things they're interested in, and so many subjects don't get covered; and news events get covered in great detail. In the past, the entry on Hurricane Frances was more than five times the length of that on Chinese art, and the entry on Coronation Street was twice as long as the article on Tony Blair."

Systemic bias in perspective

A more difficult problem to address is that, even when topics are covered, they are covered from what seems to be a neutral point of view to the current participants only, which may not meet the neutrality standards of the current readership as a whole, or of the potential readership.

The concept of a neutral point of view (NPOV) has itself been criticized as being misleading, impossible, and sometimes even offensive in its results. Some critics and even some contributors say that a NPOV is an unattainable ideal, although this does not rule out the possibility of a close approximation being reached. Other critics allege that NPOV is arguably in practice "mainstream point of view," with the effect that mainstream points of view are privileged and radical points of view disadvantaged.

Difficulty of fact-checking

Wikipedia contains no formal peer review process for fact-checking, and due to the lack of requiring qualifications to edit any article, the contributors themselves may not be well-versed in the topics they write about. As the cultural commentator Paul Vallely put it, writing in The Independent on the subject of Wikipedia:

"Using it is like asking questions of a bloke you met in the pub. He might be a nuclear physicist. Or he might be a fruitcake."

This particular criticism is one of Wikipedia's most frequently encountered weaknesses. Sometimes, the subject of a biographical article must fix blatant lies about his own life. Television personality Stephen Colbert lampooned this drawback of Wikipedia, calling it wikiality. In a typical experiment, an editor inserted mistakes into five Wikipedia articles; they remained unnoticed for up to five days by which time the editor reverted the edits himself. A hoax article, created on April Fools' Day 2005, was not deleted until January 2006.

In another example, on March 2, 2007, MSNBC.com reported that Hillary Rodham Clinton had been incorrectly listed for 20 months in her Wikipedia biography as valedictorian of her class of 1969 at Wellesley College. (Hillary Rodham was not the valedictorian, though she did speak at commencement, giving rise to the inaccuracy.) The article included a link to the Wikipedia edit, where the incorrect information was added on July 9, 2005. After the MSNBC report, the inaccurate information was removed the same day. Between the two edits, the wrong information had stayed in the Clinton article while it was edited more than 4,800 times over 20 months.

Use of dubious sources

Wikipedia requests that contributors verify the accuracy of information by checking the references cited, which generally come from external sources. Some critics contend that the references have come from dubious sources, such as blog entries. Hiawatha Bray of the Boston Globe wrote:

"So of course Wikipedia is popular. Maybe too popular. For it lacks one vital feature of the traditional encyclopedia: accountability. Old-school reference books hire expert scholars to write their articles, and employ skilled editors to check and double-check their work. Wikipedia's articles are written by anyone who fancies himself an expert."

Wikipedia content is often mirrored at sites such as Answers.com, which means that incorrect information can be replicated through a number of web sources. Such information can develop a misleading air of authority because of its presence at such sites. A converse criticism of Wikipedia is that contributors sometimes rely too much on citing sources, particularly in disputed articles.

Exposure to vandals

In November 2005, Wikipedia received a great deal of bad publicity as a result of the John Seigenthaler Sr. Wikipedia biography controversy, in which a user edited a biographical article on Seigenthaler so that it contained several false and defamatory statements. The inaccurate claims went unnoticed between May and September 2005 when they were discovered by Victor S. Johnson, Jr., a friend of Seigenthaler. Vandalism is recognized by Wikipedia as an ongoing problem facing its articles. Some users may have axes to grind on a particular subject, or may simply enjoy disrupting Wikipedia. There have also been instances of users deliberately inserting false information into Wikipedia in order to test the system and demonstrate its alleged unreliability.

Wikipedia acknowledges these issues, and the Wikipedia page "Researching with Wikipedia" states:

Wikipedia's radical openness means that any given article may be, at any given moment, in a bad state: for example, it could be in the middle of a large edit or it could have been recently vandalized. While blatant vandalism is usually easily spotted and rapidly corrected, Wikipedia is certainly more subject to subtle vandalism than a typical reference work.

Wikipedia has a range of tools available to users and administrators in order to combat vandalism. Supporters of the project argue that the vast majority of vandalism on Wikipedia is reverted within a short time, and a study by IBM found that most vandal edits were reverted within around five minutes; however, while most instances of page blanking or the addition of offensive material are soon reverted, less obvious vandalism has remained for longer periods. For example, a user made several racist edits to Martin Luther King Day that were not reverted for nearly four hours. In a project that permits open content editing there is a risk that defamatory, unsubstantiated or manifestly untrue claims will be made until they are detected and removed. The risk of undetected vandalism is at its greatest in low profile articles that receive little scrutiny, while the high profile articles are subject to near constant review. There is also a risk that edits by registered users will appear to be more reliable that those by anonymous users.

Scholarly-sounding vandalism may be difficult to detect since it is well written and fits in with the style of the article. For example, if a user edited an article to say that a famous person "farts all the time," it would probably be reverted quickly. Nevertheless, the following paragraph about flatulence was available for over a month in a Wikipedia biography:

Never the one to be embarrassed by life's peculiarities, Larry King has often been said to have a bit of a flatulence habit while on air at CNN, which isn't curbed by having guests in the studio. A favorite moment of his, and an often repeated story, involved an interview conducted with former President Jimmy Carter who, after some length of time in studio, chided Larry & asked him to please stop, or he'd have to end the interview. Larry ever present in the moment adeptly steered the conversation to global warming and the effects of bovine emissions on the ozone.

Attempts to perpetrate hoaxes may not be confined to editing Wikipedia articles. In October 2005 Alan Mcilwraith, a former call centre worker from Scotland created a Wikipedia article in which he claimed to be a highly decorated war hero. The article was quickly identified by other users as unreliable, (see Wikipedia Signpost article 17 April 2006). However, Mcilwraith had also succeeded in convincing a number of charities and media organizations that he was who he claimed to be. Wikipedia's guidelines for detecting hoaxes worked well during this incident, and the media was not critical of Wikipedia's role in the affair.

Exposure to political operatives and advocates

While Wikipedia policy requires articles to have a neutral point of view, it is not immune from attempts by outsiders (or insiders) with an agenda to place a spin on articles. In January 2006 it was revealed that several staffers of members of the U.S. House of Representatives had embarked on a campaign to cleanse their respective bosses' biographies on Wikipedia, as well as inserting negative remarks on political opponents. References to a campaign promise by Martin Meehan to surrender his seat in 2000 were deleted, and negative comments were inserted into the articles on U.S. Senator Bill Frist and Eric Cantor, a congressman from Virginia. Numerous other changes were made from an IP address which is assigned to the House of Representatives. In an interview, Wikipedia de-facto leader Jimmy Wales remarked that the changes were "not cool."

Various individuals and groups that hold different political opinions may also start "edit wars" aimed at spinning the content of an article. For instance, soon after disgraced former Enron CEO Kenneth Lay died due to a heart attack, several editors to the encyclopedia added content to Lay's Wikipedia biography surmising that the death was in fact a suicide, well in advance of any official determination of cause of death. Such edits were reverted and re-inserted several times; eventually the article reported the cause of death as a heart attack. At this time, there is no evidence to suggest that Lay's death was by other than natural causes. The edit history of the article was investigated by the press, and the Washington Post published a column by Frank Ahrens on the subject.

Privacy concerns

Most privacy concerns refer to cases of government or employer data gathering; or to computer or electronic monitoring; or to trading data between organizations.. "The Internet has created conflicts between personal privacy, commercial interests and the interests of society at large" warn James Donnelly and Jenifer Haeckl. Balancing the rights of all concerned as technology alters the social landscape will not be easy. It "is not yet possible to anticipate the path of the common law or governmental regulation" regarding this problem.

The concern in the case of Wikipedia is the right of a private citizen to remain private; to remain a "private citizen" rather than a "public figure" in the eyes of the law. It is somewhat of a battle between the right to be anonymous in cyberspace and the right to be anonymous in real life ("meatspace"). Wikipedia Watch argues that "Wikipedia is a potential menace to anyone who values privacy" and that "a greater degree of accountability in the Wikipedia structure" would be "the very first step toward resolving the privacy problem."

A particular problem occurs in the case of an individual who is relatively unimportant and for whom there exists a Wikipedia page against their wishes.

In January 2006, a German court ordered the German-language Wikipedia shut down within Germany due to its publication of the full name of Boris Floricic, aka "Tron", a deceased hacker who was formerly with the Chaos Computer Club. More specifically, the court ordered that the URL within the German .de domain (http://www.wikipedia.de/) may no longer redirect to the encyclopedia's servers in Florida at http://de.wikipedia.org/, though since German readers are still able to use the US-based URL directly, there is not really any loss of access on their part. The court order arose out of a lawsuit filed by Floricic's parents, demanding that their son's surname be removed from Wikipedia. On February 9, 2006, the injunction against Wikimedia Deutschland was overturned. The plaintiffs appealed to the Berlin state court, but were refused relief in May 2006.

Quality concerns

Many critics of Wikipedia — as well as many Wikipedia editors — have observed that the quality of articles varies widely, even when controversial topics are excluded from the discussion. Some articles are excellent by any reasonable measure — authored and edited by persons knowledgeable in the field, containing numerous useful and relevant references, and written in a proper encyclopedic style. However, there are many articles on Wikipedia that are amateurish, unauthoritative, and even incorrect, making it difficult for a reader unfamiliar with a given subject matter to know which information to rely upon. In addition, Wikipedia contains many stubs — very short articles that provide a brief definition of a term, and little else.

Others have noted that in some areas, such as science, Wikipedia's quality is often excellent. A report by the science journal Nature claimed that "Wikipedia comes close to Britannica in terms of the accuracy of its science entries." The article detailed a study wherein 42 articles in both encyclopedias were reviewed by experts on the subject matter. Based on the review, the average Wikipedia article contained 4 errors or omissions; the average Britannica article, 3. Encyclopædia Britannica's initial concerns led to Nature releasing further documentation of its survey method. Encyclopædia Britannica, in its formal corporate response "Fatally Flawed" responded that

"[t]hat conclusion was false, however, because Nature's research was invalid. As we demonstrate below, almost everything about the journal’s investigation, from the criteria for identifying inaccuracies to the discrepancy between the article text and its headline, was wrong and misleading."

Nature has since rejected the Britannica response and published a point-by-point response to Britannica's specific objections about alleged errors.

Threat to traditional publishers

Some observers claim that Wikipedia is undesirable, because it is an economic threat to publishers of traditional encyclopedias, many of whom may be unable to compete with a product which is essentially free. Nicholas Carr writes in the essay "The amorality of Web 2.0," speaking of the so-called Web 2.0 as a whole: "Implicit in the ecstatic visions of Web 2.0 is the hegemony of the amateur. I for one can't imagine anything more frightening." Others dispute the notion that Wikipedia, or similar efforts, will entirely displace traditional publications. For instance, Chris Anderson, the editor-in-chief of Wired Magazine, wrote in Nature that the "wisdom of the crowds" approach of Wikipedia will not displace top scientific journals with their rigorous peer review process.

"Waffling" prose and "antiquarianism"

Roy Rosenzweig, in a June 2006 essay that combined both praise and criticism of Wikipedia, had several criticisms of its prose and its failure to distinguish the genuinely important from the merely sensational. While acknowledging that Wikipedia is "surprisingly accurate in reporting names, dates, and events in U.S. history" (Rosenzweig's own field of study) and that most of the few factual errors that he found "were small and inconsequential" and that "some errors simply repeat widely held but inaccurate beliefs," many of which are also reflected in Encarta and the Britannica, nonetheless

"Good historical writing requires not just factual accuracy but also a command of the scholarly literature, persuasive analysis and interpretations, and clear and engaging prose. By those measures, American National Biography Online easily outdistances Wikipedia."

Contrasting Wikipedia's treatment of Abraham Lincoln to that of Civil War historian James McPherson in American National Biography Online, he acknowledges that both are essentially accurate and cover the major episodes in Lincoln's life, but praises "McPherson’s richer contextualization… his artful use of quotations to capture Lincoln’s voice … and … his ability to convey a profound message in a handful of words." By contrast, he cites an example of Wikipedia's prose that he finds "both verbose and dull." Further, he contrasts "the skill and confident judgment of a seasoned historian" displayed by McPherson and others to the "antiquarianism" of Wikipedia (which he compares in this respect to American Heritage magazine), and states that while Wikipedia often provides extensive references, they are not the best ones. Still, he acknowledges that "not all historians write as well as McPherson and [Alan] Brinkley, and some of the better-written Wikipedia entries provide more engaging portraits than some sterile and routine entries in American National Biography Online.

Rosenzweig also criticizes the "waffling—encouraged by the npov policy—[that] means that it is hard to discern any overall interpretive stance in Wikipedia history." He cites as an example of this the conclusion of Wikipedia's article on William Clarke Quantrill. While generally praising the article, he nonetheless points to its "waffling" conclusion: "Some historians…remember him as an opportunistic, bloodthirsty outlaw, while others continue to view him as a daring soldier and local folk hero."

Anonymous editing

Wikipedia has been criticized by many for allowing users to edit anonymously, with only their IP address to identify them. This is said to allow the vandals anonymity and makes it difficult to track them, due to the long and hard-to-remember nature of IP addresses. For instance, Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger wrote:

Widespread anonymity leads to a distinguishable problem, namely, the attractiveness of the project to people who merely want to cause trouble, or who want to undermine the project, or who want to change it into something that it is avowedly not – in other words, the troll problem.

However, anonymous editors reveal their IP addresses, which can be used by admins to complain to Internet service providers or to put "range blocks" in place. Admins may also choose not to block because they might exclude regular contributors who share the same IP. Knowledgeable computer users and hackers, though, are easily capable of finding ways around IP blocking. Many have suggested requiring users to register before editing articles, and as of December 6, 2005 only registered users can create pages.

Copyright issues

A significant number of people, including Jimmy Wales, the de-facto leader of the project, have commented that many images, and some articles, are copyright violations. Often images are uploaded and incorrectly tagged as fair use, which is discouraged but not disallowed on the English-language Wikipedia (other language projects each have their own image copyright policy); however, unless an image provides a reasonable justification for fair use, it will usually be deleted within a few weeks. There is also a copyright violations page where violations can be listed, and Wikipedia has their own designated agent who can take down content upon request, as required by current United States law (see Online Copyright Infringement Liability Limitation Act).

The "hive mind"

See also: Conformity (psychology) and Groupthink

In his article, Digital Maoism: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism (first published online by Edge: The Third Culture, 30 May 2006), computer scientist and digital theorist Jaron Lanier describes Wikipedia as a "hive mind" that is "for the most part stupid and boring," and asks, rhetorically, "why pay attention to it?" His thesis follows:

The problem is in the way the Wikipedia has come to be regarded and used; how it's been elevated to such importance so quickly. And that is part of the larger pattern of the appeal of a new online collectivism that is nothing less than a resurgence of the idea that the collective is all-wise, that it is desirable to have influence concentrated in a bottleneck that can channel the collective with the most verity and force. This is different from representative democracy, or meritocracy. This idea has had dreadful consequences when thrust upon us from the extreme Right or the extreme Left in various historical periods. The fact that it's now being re-introduced today by prominent technologists and futurists, people who in many cases I know and like, doesn't make it any less dangerous.

Lanier goes on to point out the economic trend to reward entities that aggregate information, rather than those that actually generate content. In the absence of "new business models," the popular demand for content will be sated by mediocrity, thus reducing or even eliminating any monetary incentives for the production of new knowledge.

Lanier's opinions produced some strong disagreement. Internet consultant Clay Shirky noted that Wikipedia has many internal controls in place and is not a mere mass of unintelligent collective effort:

Neither proponents nor detractors of hive mind rhetoric have much interesting to say about Wikipedia itself, because both groups ignore the details...Wikipedia is best viewed as an engaged community that uses a large and growing number of regulatory mechanisms to manage a huge set of proposed edits...To take the specific case of Wikipedia, the Seigenthaler/Kennedy debacle catalyzed both soul-searching and new controls to address the problems exposed, and the controls included, inter alia, a greater focus on individual responsibility, the very factor “Digital Maoism” denies is at work.

Criticism of the contributors

Flame wars

A common complaint about Wikipedia concerns flame wars. This concern has been acknowledged by Wikipedia; a concept of "Wikiquette" has been adopted by some users in response.

Fanatics and special interests

Another complaint about Wikipedia focuses on the efforts of contributors with idiosyncratic beliefs, who push their point of view in an effort to dominate articles, especially controversial ones. This sometimes results in revert wars and pages being locked down. In response, an Arbitration Committee has been formed on the English Wikipedia that deals with the worst alleged offenders — though a conflict resolution strategy is actively encouraged before going to this extent. Also, to stop the continuous reverting of pages, Jimmy Wales introduced a "three revert rule", whereby those users who revert an article more than three times in a 24 hour period may be blocked.

A related criticism is that a politically liberal bias is predominant. This belief led to the creation of Conservapedia, whose founder asserts that Wikipedia's use of the abbreviations "C.E." and "B.C.E." in place of the conventional "A.D." and "B.C." is reflective of an anti-Christian bias. Wikipedia has also been criticised for failing to deal with pro-pedophile activists, and has been described as the "'wild west' of encyclopedias" and a "passive corporate sex offender" by Perverted-Justice.

Censorship

Some argue that criticisms and commentary on certain topics are systematically excluded, deleted or reverted by self-appointed censors, and that even attempts to make compromises or build up articles to include a variety of views are thwarted by uncompromising "vandal-editors" who simply remove or revert unwanted views that don't fit their agenda. The site Wikitruth claims that editors with oversight authority censor Wikipedia by eliminating previous edits in a way which makes them unavailable for future viewing.

Another complaint is that Wikipedia attempts to suppress criticism of itself, citing the alleged treatment of Wikitruth, an internet site that is highly critical of the encyclopedia. The site has generally been excluded from being listed as a reference in several Wikipedia articles. Critics charge that such sites are systematically excluded because of their anti-Wikipedia viewpoints. Encyclopedia administrators, on the other hand, have claimed that such websites fail to meet Wikipedia's standards as a reliable source, and note that many websites and publications critical of Wikipedia are included as sources by the encyclopedia.

Abuse of power

Some contributors have quit after denouncing what they have described as abuses of power by administrators and the arbitration committee. Such alleged abuses include policy violations by administrators and arbitration committee actions which contravene Wikipedia's arbitration guidelines.

It has also been alleged that there is a cult-like reverence for leader Jimmy Wales. The websites Wikitruth and Wikipedia Watch are among those that level this charge. References to "King Jimbo" and "Prince Danny" are often used in circles critical of Wikipedia, due in part to the fact that Wales and former Wikimedia Foundation employee Danny Wool are able to take unilateral action in stripping articles of perceived bias where threats of lawsuits or libel charges are involved.

Although Wikipedia is largely self-governed, Wikipedia leadership also has the ability to make binding policy decisions, even with little support among contributors for these changes. This creates a potential for alienation of contributors, although to date such changes have not invited great controversy.

Level of debate

The standard of debate has also been called into question by persons who have noted that contributors can make a long list of salient points and pull in a wide range of empirical observations to back up their arguments, only to have them ignored completely on the site. Also, attempts to develop "standards" for articles pertaining to similar topics, or layouts of articles, can often become mired in a debate that goes round and round about who prefers what layout, with no end consensus being possible. An example of this is the endless debate as to whether all of the English Wikipedia should use British or American English exclusively. Due to the open-source nature of the Wikipedia project, it becomes impossible to establish and maintain standard article models and styles. Hence, editorial choices can often become the sole purview of persons who have the most time to contribute to Wikipedia, whether or not their preferred style is accepted outside of Wikipedia.

Male domination

In November 2006 a group of female long-term contributors to Wikipedia formed WikiChix, a group inspired and modeled after the female-dominated LinuxChix, in response to their perception of how male-dominated Wikipedia has become, and how uncomfortable some women are when contributing in such an atmosphere. One example of their frustration, though not explicitly cited by the WikiChix community, was the attempt to create the article "Feminist science fiction," which became the subject of a revision war which was ultimately resolved, unsatisfactorily to many, by changing the title to "Women in science fiction" in October 2002. The article at "Feminist science fiction" was then only restarted in June 2006. The existence of a mailing list limited exclusively to female contributors prompted some controversy; the list was subsequently moved from the Wikimedia Foundation's servers to Wikia, the separate wiki-hosting service. A study by Hitwise found that visitors to Wikipedia are almost equally split 50/50 male/female, but that 60% of edits are made by male editors.

Community

The Wikipedia community consists of a small group of the most frequent contributors. Emigh and Herring argue that "a few active users, when acting in concert with established norms within an open editing system, can achieve ultimate control over the content produced within the system, literally erasing diversity, controversy, and inconsistency, and homogenizing contributors' voices." Editors on Wikinfo, a fork of Wikipedia, similarly argue that new or controversial editors to Wikipedia are often unjustly labeled "trolls" or "problem users" and blocked from editing. The community has also been criticized for responding to complaints regarding an article's quality by advising the complainer to fix the article themselves. Professor James H. Fetzer criticized Wikipedia in that he could not change the article about himself; to ensure impartiality, Wikipedia has a policy that discourages the editing of biographies by the subjects themselves except in "clear-cut cases", such as reverting vandalism or correcting out-of-date or mistaken facts.

The community has been described as "cult-like," although not always with entirely negative connotations. A popular joke is that Wikipedia can't possibly work in theory, but does work in practice. A larger social community also helps in maintaining a supportive atmosphere and collective etiquette, such as resolving disputes by appealing to reliable sources and Wikipedia's own policies. Some Wikipedia editions offer reference desks at which questions from the public are answered by volunteer Wikipedians, similar to the Library Reference Service once offered to subscribers by the Encyclopædia Britannica. Wikipedia also hosts a special community portal and a weekly newspaper, The Wikipedia Signpost, that describes recent developments and achievements in Wikipedia.

Wikipedia does not require that its users identify themselves. This anonymity has been criticized, since it does not allow editors to be held accountable for their edits. It also means that multiple people may use one account — or, more often, one person may use multiple accounts, often in an attempt to influence an argument. The latter practice is known as "sock puppetry," which is actively discouraged on Wikipedia.

The New Yorker article and the Essjay controversy

Main article: Essjay controversy

In July 2006 The New Yorker ran a feature about Wikipedia by Stacy Schiff. Experts including the president of Encyclopædia Britannica, Jorge Cauz, and Wikipedia's de-facto leader Jimmy Wales, gave their opinions on the future of Wikipedia. Cauz stated that Wikipedia risked a "decline into a hulking, mediocre mass of uneven, unreliable, and, many times, unreadable articles" and that "Wikipedia is to Britannica as American Idol is to the Juilliard School." Wales countered by stating that he would consider Britannica a competitor, “except that I think they will be crushed out of existence within five years.”

The New Yorker article included an interview with a Wikipedia administrator known by the pseudonym Essjay, who was described in the article as a tenured professor of theology. Essjay's Wikipedia user page (now removed) made the following claim:

I am a tenured professor of theology at a private university in the eastern United States; I teach both undergraduate and graduate theology. I have been asked repeatedly to reveal the name of the institution, however, I decline to do so; I am unsure of the consequences of such an action, and believe it to be in my best interests to remain anonymous.

Essjay also claimed on his user page that he held four academic degrees: Bachelor of Arts in Religious Studies (B.A.), Master of Arts in Religion (M.A.R.), Doctorate of Philosophy in Theology (Ph.D.), and Doctorate in Canon Law (JCD). Essjay specialized in editing articles about religion on Wikipedia, and on one occasion he was called in to give some "expert testimony" on the status of Mary in the Roman Catholic Church. In January 2007, Essjay was hired as a manager with Wikia, a wiki-hosting service founded by Wales and Angela Beesley. In February, Wales appointed Essjay as a member of the Wikipedia Arbitration Committee, a group with powers to issue binding rulings in disputes relating to Wikipedia.

In late February 2007 The New Yorker added an editorial note to its article on Wikipedia stating that it had learned that Essjay was Ryan Jordan, a 24-year-old college dropout from Kentucky with no advanced degrees and no teaching experience. Initially Jimmy Wales commented on the issue of Essjay's identity: "I regard it as a pseudonym and I don’t really have a problem with it." Larry Sanger, co-founder of Wikipedia, responded to Wales on his Citizendium blog by calling Wales' initial reaction "utterly breathtaking, and ultimately tragic." Sanger said the controversy "reflects directly on the judgment and values of the management of Wikipedia."

Wales later issued a new statement on his Wikipedia user talk page. He stated that he had not previously understood that "EssJay used his false credentials in content disputes." He added: "I have asked EssJay to resign his positions of trust within the [Wikipedia] community." Sanger responded the next day: "It seems Jimmy finds nothing wrong, nothing trust-violating, with the act itself of openly and falsely touting many advanced degrees on Wikipedia. But there most obviously is something wrong with it, and it’s just as disturbing for Wikipedia’s head to fail to see anything wrong with it."

On March 4, Essjay wrote on his user page that he was leaving Wikipedia, and he also resigned his position with Wikia. A subsequent article in the Louisville Courier-Journal suggested that the new résumé he had posted at his Wikia page was exaggerated. The March 19, 2007 issue of The New Yorker published a formal apology by Wales to the magazine and Stacy Schiff for Essjay's false statements.

Discussing the incident, the New York Times noted that the Wikipedia community had responded to the affair with "the fury of the crowd," and observed:

The Essjay episode underlines some of the perils of collaborative efforts like Wikipedia that rely on many contributors acting in good faith, often anonymously and through self-designated user names. But it also shows how the transparency of the Wikipedia process — all editing of entries is marked and saved — allows readers to react to suspected fraud.

The Essjay incident received extensive media coverage, including a national U.S. television broadcast on ABC's World News with Charles Gibson and a March 7, 2007 Associated Press story that was picked up by more than 100 media outlets listed in the Google news cache. The controversy has led to proposals that users claiming to possess academic qualifications would have to provide evidence before citing them in Wikipedia content disputes.

Humorous criticism

Wikipedia is frequently satirized by humorists who call attention to factual inaccuracies that may appear in articles owing to sloppy or biased editors and/or vandalism. For example, an article in The Onion was entitled "Wikipedia Celebrates 750 Years Of American Independence". In a piece on The Colbert Report, entitled "Wikiality," Stephen Colbert encouraged his viewers to change Wikipedia's article on elephants to state that the number of African elephants had tripled in the last six months. Colbert's comments provoked a wave of vandalism of various articles at Wikipedia. On the 28 January, 2007 edition of his program, Colbert did another segment on an attempt by Microsoft to hire writers to skew certain Wikipedia articles in their favor, ending with a call by Colbert to change the Wikipedia article on "reality" to the phrase "Reality has become a commodity" and offering a $5 cash reward to the first viewer to do so. In the animated American Dad! episode "Black Mystery Month" the character Steve Smith, seeking the “one place where a person can put out crazy information with no evidence that millions will accept as true,” turns to Wikipedia. Mad has also spoofed Wikipedia several times in a section of "short takes" on topics of current interest, and a number of comic strips, comic books, and webcomics have made mention of it, usually in a satiric vein.

Notes

See also

• Andrew Orlowski
• Reliability of Wikipedia
• Wikipedia community
• Wikitruth

External links

• "Wikipedia: A Million Monkeys Typing" Editorial note from Workers Vanguard, biweekly newspaper of the Spartacist League/US [1]
• "Communiqué from Wikiality" Letter and response from Workers Vanguard on Wikipedia [2]
• The Book Stops Here Wired News article
• Microsoft's step into Wikipedia prompts debate
• Wiki wars, an article on Red Herring about contentious articles on Wikipedia (registration required)
• The Messiness of WikiDemocracy - by M.R.M. Parrott. Over-all positive but discusses some problems
• WikiTruth A non-public Wiki covering supposed abuse of Wikipedia by its own users and admins
• DWEECs Long running suggestions of systematic bias by Devout Western Educated Ecumenical Christians editing Wikipedia
• Wikiwatch

Dated links

• Wikipedia is a real-life Hitchhiker's Guide: huge, nerdy, and imprecise - by Paul Boutin, Slate, May 3 2005.
• Wikipedia Reputation and the Wemedia Project, quoting many people criticizing Wikipedia and others rebutting them, by Ross Mayfield, August 29 2004.
• Wikipedia: The Agony of Delete - by Rogers Cadenhead, August 31 2005.
• Wikipedia target of House 'editors' - by Evan Lehmann, TheTranscript.com, January 30 2006.
• A thirst for knowledge by Andrew Orlowski The Guardian April 13, 2006
• Can you trust Wikipedia? - by Mike Barnes, The Guardian, October 24 2005.
• Wikipedia: magic, monkeys and typewriters - by Andrew Orlowski, The Register, October 24 2005.
• Can you trust Wikipedia? - by Elvira van Noort, Mail & Guardian (South Africa), November 7 2005.
• A false Wikipedia 'biography' - by John Seigenthaler Sr., USA Today, November 29 2005.
• "The Danger of Wikipedia", Editor and Publisher, November 30 2005. (Login required)
• Snared in the Web of a Wikipedia Liar - by Katharine Q. Seelye in The New York Times, December 3 2005.
• Unreliable (adj): log on and see - by Rosemary Righter, The Times, December 9 2005
• Online encyclopedias put to the test - by Stephen Cauchi, December 14 2005.
• Wikipedia science 31% more cronky than Britannica's - by Andrew Orlowski, The Register, December 16 2005.
• "Wikipedia founder admits to serious quality problems" - by Andrew Orlowski, The Register, December 18 2005.
• oes Wikipedia win through the "wisdom of crowds"? by Jack Schofield Guardian Unlimited December 19 2005
• Turf Wars: Wikipedia spars with a splinter site for truth by Julian Dibbell The Village Voice May 2, 2006
• Wikipedia Founder Looks Out for Number 1 - by Rogers Cadenhead, December 19 2005.
• Wikipedia target of House 'editors' - by Evan Lehmann, TheTranscript.com, January 30 2006.
• Profs knock Wikipedia - by Brittany Anas, February 6 2006. (Login required)
• The Wikipedia FAQK, Wired article that provides sarcastic advice to new Wikipedia contributors. April 19, 2006
• Neil Gaiman: What Bears Do On the Lawn, May 11, 2006, criticism of Wikipedia by noted author and essayist Neil Gaiman.
• "U. Florida cops ask fiction writer for fingerprints, DNA", boingboing, May 22 2006, retrieved May 25 2006.
• Wikis Are a Waste of Time bySteven J. Vaughan-Nichols eWeek May 22, 2006
• The death of Wikipedia by Nicholas Carr May 24, 2006
• Now, let's bury the myth by Nicholas Carr May 25, 2006
• Wikipedia Celebrates 750 Years Of American Independence The Onion's satirical view July 26, 2006
• How wiki-wiki can get sticky by Ben Macintyre The Times July 21, 2006
• Segal, David (December 3 2006). "Our love/hate relationship with Wikipedia". Washington Post. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
• McNamara, Paul (December 3 2006). "Look Me Up Under 'Missing Link'". NetworkWorld. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
• "The Shiny Diamonds 1". On the Coast. 2006-12-19. 165 minutes in. CBC Radio. CBC Radio One. {{cite episode}}: External link in |series= and |title= (help); Unknown parameter |city= ignored (|location= suggested) (help)
• "The Shiny Diamonds 2". On the Coast. 2006-12-20. 105 minutes in. CBC Radio. CBC Radio One. {{cite episode}}: External link in |series= and |title= (help); Unknown parameter |city= ignored (|location= suggested) (help)
• "Stabbing Polonius" by Nicholas Carr April 27, 2007
• Sand Castles of Knowledge by Kyle Gann May 5, 2007
• Why Wikipedia will never reach quality, criticism of Wikipedia May 10, 2007

This article incorporates text from the GFDL Wikipedia page Wikipedia:Replies to common objections.