rangerBlog - July 19th, 2007

11:01 am - on Wikipedia

Okay, I've just read news article N+1 from a mainstream news outlet saying essentially- "Those young kids, they love their Wikipedia, but look how unreliable it is!"

This article rankled the first 100 or so times I read it, but the smug tone of this latest has now actively pissed me off.
So I'm going to say this only once:

The Reasons Us Wacky Kids Trust Wikipedia

1) It's up to date. People online are sick of web sites that don't have freshness dating on their information. "The population of Uganda is X." Now? 1996? If the article was written in 2001, did it use numbers from 1996? Wikipedia's information is live. It's time dependent data is marked as such, usually with some sort of reference link to a government or UN site where you can get the most up-to-date figures if they're not in the article itself. And ultimately if you doubt how fresh a section is, you can ply apart the history of a page and see when that section was added, and last updated. Dating is something the world wide web, which exists eternally in the 'now' is bad at. Wikipedia is notably good at it.

2) References and links. Wikipedia, unlike encyclopedia articles or news stories, incldues references for sources used- often with hyperlinks if they're online, and links to other sources for more information. On a web page a list of links to 'more information' is almost useless- a) because it's usually the first random 20 links out of a search engine b) because half those links are out of date. Wikipedia's links are up to date, and if an article has seen even a moderate level of activity, they tend to be the best, most informative links to be found on the subject, because they're the best sources the people who've worked ont he article, who've immersed themselves in the subject, can find.

3) Length. Wikipedia articles are not confined in length like physical reference materials. They will continue expanding until there is nothing more on the subject to add- but without becoming an unscanable sea of text, because Wikipedia articles tend to be broken up into sub-articles when they get too long. The result is incredibly fast data-seek times, but an almost fractal knowledge-tree-node structure that lets you dive deeper and deeper into a subject, then offers ideas for further readings when you reach the (present) limit of its documentation.

4) Practical application. It pisses me off no end to be looking up some obscure technical protocol and find dozens and dozens of web pages (and yes, books) discussing it in the abstract- but not a single source telling you how to implement it in practical terms. If I go to a Wikipedia article I know that 50 other pissed-off coders will have beaten me to it and added a link in the header of the article "This is about the protocol in abstract, for implementation methods, go HERE." And on the finite chance I'm the first one there- I can add such a link when I find such a source.

5) Visualizations. Wikipedia has some of the best data visualizations for abstract scientific concepts you'll ever find. Scientists have awful communications skills, they should never be allowed to create charts, graphs, diagrams or functional cutaways. Wiki-editors take great joy in turning these terrible visualizations into good, clear ones. Likewise- though the physics article are among the densest all-the-math-left-in writeups you'll ever encounter- most of them have 'plain english' versions written too.

6) It's readable. Though it may not be beautiful, the text on Wikipedia is eminently readable. Several hundred editors can very quickly iron out unclear or unnecessarily thick run-on sentences, swap paragraphs where it makes more logical sense to do so, and relocate information to the place it's best suited in an article. The articles have clear and logical flow to them by the simple brute force expediency of hundreds editors, overcoming the kind of blind spots even a good writer inevitably falls prey to.

7) The 1000. There are 1000 Wikipedia editors that make half the changes to Wikipedia, making edits for spelling, grammar, structure and clarity, reverting vandalism, organizing, cross-linking, categorizing, moving articles and moderating discussions of contentious issues. In short- they run thankless, humorless completely autonomous cleanup, constantly polishing Wikipedia into a better-organized, better-cited, better written, better structured resource.

8) You suck. That's an imperative you, aimed at the media outlets that keep writing these smug stories that don't understand what's so great about Wikipedia. You're what's so great about it. In the last 10 years the mass media stopped filtering news and started treating it like entertainment. Instead of informing us about which opposing viewpoints were legitimate, the news started parading fringe lunatics in front of us under the banner of "we report, you decide" and freak of the week tragedy stories.

Wikipedia most central policy is WP:NPOV, it requires articles represent all significant views fairly and without bias. It does not have Equal time for Nut Jobs. Wikipedia has a basic journalistic principle to present an accurate picture of the events that enables us to make informed judgments about the world, while the news organizations that are supposed to keep us informed have monetized our ignorance.

In summary: The smug 'Wikipedia is full of errors' articles from media outlets have to stop. Not because it's not- but because Wikipedia isn't an encyclopedia in the sense we're used to thinking of it. Encyclopedias are dead things, compiled years after the fact. Wikipedia is alive, and up to date, and more content-rich than watching 24 hours of television news- or reading 3 national newspapers. (Try it, see how much repeated content, often word for word you run into.) It has policies and guiding philosophies against Public Relations pieces, press releases, excessive spin and attempts to plant untruth Yes, it's subject to all those forces, but at least Wikipedia is resisting them while television and print are embracing pre-fab content from people eager to commodify our perception of reality.

At a time when consolidation in the traditional media means there are fewer voices and less content from more sources, Wikipedia is offering more voices and more content.