Wikipedia accuracy and bias
My previous posting of links to Wikipedia’s entries on cognitive bias led me to think about Wikipedia more generally.
For those who don’t know it, Wikipedia is an effort to create a comprehensive encyclopedia through continual creation and editing of entries by anyone in the world. If you know something about frogs, you can see what Wikipedia has to say and add details, identify errors, suggest alternative phrasings, and make the changes yourself. It’s an interesting idea that can lead to potentially richer presentations of topics than those found in a more standard encyclopedia entry written by a single, supposedly objective expert hired by a corporate publisher.
In recent months there’s been criticism of Wikipedia because of insertion of false information into, or removal of accurate information from, a variety of entries. But what’s most fascinating to me is not so much intentional efforts to mislead but the discussions among people trying to get an entry right. Instead of just reading any article by itself, click on the Discussion tab at the top. That’s where you can read, and participate in, a conversation among participants about what to include, what to take out, what to change. Sometimes this is polite, sometimes nasty. It’s often fun, but more important, it’s instructive to see people try to figure out how to describe a topic they care about accurately and comprehensively.
This is true even for noncontroversial issues — say, Frogs — where participants suggest alternative wording, ask what others think should be included and how best to describe it, request sources for specific information, and so on. It turns out it’s not always easy to describe even something that seems straightforward.
The effort to be accurate gets especially heated when the topic is more controversial — anarchism, Israel-Palestinian Conflict, psychology, law, etc. Some participants try to figure out what’s “objectively true” and thus supposedly acceptable to those on both sides of the issue, but this often becomes impossible, partly because every complex topic begins with underlying assumptions that often turn out to be not universally shared. Others more consciously try to use facts to prove their own point of view, but that can lead to the same problem. What counts as a “fact”? What is, as Wikipedia puts it, POV (point of view)?
The Wikipedia project appeals to the anarchist in me, and Wikipedia itself discusses the tension between its anarchist underpinnings and its interest in accuracy and efficiency. Anarchists don’t always like how Wikipedia operates (see Chuck Munson’s Wikipedia Hall of Shame blog entry), partly because of perceived individualist/capitalist bias in Wikipedia’s anarchism entries.
There’s also this anti-Wikipedia site, Wikipedia Review, which I just found and glanced at.
