Wikipedia's Identity Crisis

by jordan | March 23, 2008 at 01:05 pm | 381 views | 2 comments

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Wikipedia fascinates me. Its creators' intentions were so straightforward: create a user-powered encyclopedia that can be changed as our understanding evolves, and as new technology and memes emerge. Since those early days, though, the Wiki project has become muddied due to spooking, flame wars between contributors, hacking, and info hijacking by those seeking to control their own online images and reputations.

Beyond that, though, another fundamental question is emerging: what's really important enough to include in the Wikipedia canon?

It can either strive to encompass every aspect of human knowledge, no matter how trivial; or it can adopt a more stringent editorial policy and ban articles on trivial subjects, in the hope that this will enhance its reputation as a trustworthy and credible reference source. These two conflicting visions are at the heart of a bitter struggle inside Wikipedia between “inclusionists”, who believe that applying strict editorial criteria will dampen contributors' enthusiasm for the project, and “deletionists” who argue that Wikipedia should be more cautious and selective about its entries.

Consider the fictional characters of Pokémon, the Japanese game franchise with a huge global following, for example. Almost 500 of them have biographies on the English-language version of Wikipedia (the largest edition, with over 2m entries), with a level of detail that many real characters would envy. But search for biographies of the leaders of the Solidarity movement in Poland, and you would find no more than a dozen—and they are rather poorly edited.

Personally, I use Wikipedia as a launch pad for deeper searches, be it for political leaders, geographical references or items to add color to a NowPublic posting. The issue of reliability/authority is, to my mind, a far larger one that which topics are more deserving of coverage.

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Swan

at 13:19 on March 23rd, 2008

good stuff:

This is an excellent story Jordan,

I tend to use Wikipedia mostly for definitions and bios, because I too, don't trust them 100% to have absolutely correct information on anything else.
~ Swan

ScienceDave

at 19:04 on March 23rd, 2008

good stuff:

But search for biographies of the leaders of the Solidarity movement in
Poland, and you would find no more than a dozen—and they are rather
poorly edited.

Sure - that's because the majority of Wikipedia users aren't interested in the solidarity movement in Poland. I wonder if the Encyclopedia Britannica has a thorough account of the solidarity movement?

As for, "Deletionists believe that Wikipedia will be more successful if it maintains a certain relevance and quality threshold for its entries." you obviously run a slippery slope - what is relevant or of a high enough quality to be included? If Wikipedia was founded on democratic ideals, surely these idels will be lost if such ephemeral notions as relevance and quality determine what ends up on the site.

On a side note, you know a community takes itself too seriously when "inclusionist" and "deletionist" become serious terms to describe community members.