Jimmy Wales, cofounder of Wikipedia. (Credit: Andrew Lih)
Cofounder Jimmy Wales updates Technology Review on Wikipedia.
Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia for which anyone may write and edit, is now in its sixth year and has nearly 1.3 million articles in English. Recently, Wikipedians from around the world gathered in Cambridge, MA, to discuss, among other things, how to make the enormous online encyclopedia more accurate, more organized, and easier to use. Author and Web expert Lawrence Lessig refered to the conference, known as Wikimania 2006, as "the Woodstock of the 21st century."
Technology Review asked Jimmy Wales, the encyclopedia's cofounder, to update us on his project. His message: Wikipedia is akin to rock-and-roll music in the 1950s: many people are skeptical of it because it's unconventional. It's also not perfect, but with the help of its software engineers, administrators, and contributors, it will get better, he says. Given time, Wales says, Wikipedia will be as significant as Elvis, doing for the reference book world what the king of rock-and-roll did for music.
Technology Review: Larry Sanger, one of your early collaborators on Wikipedia, once described Wiki entries as not necessarily the truth, but at best, a kind of "received truth," or the consensus view on a subject. Do you agree, and do you think this is problematic?
Jimmy Wales: I don't think "received truth" has ever been clearly defined. When you have thoughtful, reasonable individuals discussing how to present things in a way that's satisfactory to a broad range of people, and when you use scholarly standards, such as requiring authors to cite sources, the end result isn't very different from a traditional reference work.
TR: Sometimes Wikipedia entries are not the received truth. They're not even accurate, by the best lights of the consensual view.
JW: Wikipedia is a work in progress. Mistakes are made during the editing process -- sometimes before they have time to be corrected. There are errors in any large-scale human product. I think people have the wrong idea of how accurate traditional reference works are. In the study done by the journal Nature last December, experts seriously looking for errors found about three errors per article in the Encyclopedia Britannica.
The real question is: Does our process weed out errors? The study that hasn't been done, but would be worth doing, is comparing 100 random Wikipedia articles to themselves two, three, and four years ago, to see the trajectory. I think you'd see dramatic improvements in almost every case. In some cases, you may find we had it better a year ago, which means something went wrong with our system.
TR: The Nature study also found about four errors per Wikipedia article compared with Britannica's three. Why is Wikipedia wrong more often than conventional encyclopedias?
JW: Because it's new. If you look at the best articles on Wikipedia -- the work that has had the most attention, diverse contributors, and healthy dialogue -- they're significantly better than conventional encyclopedias. In areas where we're not as good, we're improving in that direction.
Google's Knol project aims to make online information easier to find and more authoritative.
Guest (Chris Bradley)
Have you had your head in the clouds for too long to realize that the blanket is about to be pulled out from under your entire profession? Imagine people gaining doctorates without attending classes and laughing as those who do cringe in the fire...
Muhahahhaaha!
Guest (Xsarthis)
Are you stupid? Medicine will always be years of study and hard work. My fiance is finishing up her studies as a Physician's Assist. and I couldn't possibly know what she does without an enormous amount of study or work.
The internet is good for reference, but hell, you need to go to school to get scholarly reference and guidance, especially, in the sciences.
-X-
Check out AZMD.net - Your Source in Subculture Popculture
Guest (Tysto)
Wikipedia's value is marred by vandalism, not inaccuracy
Wikipedia is a great place to start finding out about a subject (in no case should it or any other encyclopedia be the primary source for even a high school paper), but vandalism is a huge problem. I think they should raise the bar to entry, at least limiting edit rights on heavily-vandalized articles to members with 500+ edits (new users could still make suggestions on the article's talk page). That would greatly reduce the casual vandalism and willful ignorance edits. I think the German experiment is too restrictive.
Guest (BT)
A variant of this is already in effect. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Semi-protection_policy. As a fairly regular editor, vandalism is not so much of a problem because it is normally quite obvious. If you are reading the biography of Isaac Newton and you come across the line "My gym teacher smells", you can be fairly certain that you've stumbled across some vandalism. Sneaky vandalism to little looked at pages is far more of a problem. For an example, see a recent article in Wikipedia's community newsletter at Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2006-08-07/Baseball biographies. In any case, editors are seriously considering the German process of stable version if the test succeeds. See Wikipedia:Stable versions.
Guest (Bruce Hitchman)
I'd like to have an avenue available to direct comments or discussion to the 'peer reviewers' in some cases. A few articles treating subjects I know well are not only defective in detail, but are submitted in a form that makes a proper abstract impossible to achieve by sorting out the accuracy of the claims. Is there a method for submitting an entirely revised article for review?
Guest (llywrch)
There are two ways of contacting the editors if you want to submit a detailed rewrite:
1. E-mail one of the editors who has been working frequently or recently on the article, asking for help with this rewrite.
2. Propose it on the talk page.
Remember, you are addressing volunteers who, while usually very welcoming, often are a bit suspicious due to past experiences with troublemakers. Explain your qualifications, show a little good faith, & I'll be surprised if you aren't successful in helping us improve this free encyclopedia.
Geoff
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Guest (C.N.Guerriere,M.D.)
Why Wikepedia
I'm not sure why people are so interested in Wiki;why would someone trust the internet for valid information when there are no qualifications for submitting information.We are constantly trying to educate patients who come in with false information tey have acquired on the net.For some reason,many believe info they have read on the net is gospel.Intelligent people will keep up with the flow of corrections on Wikepedia,but many willr read one entry and believe it as fact.
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Guest (MDS)
Why Wikipedia?
Collective development is always exhilirating, especially when it has at its core an altruistic goal to present a free source of information. And really, are the errors from the internet due to visiting Wikipedia, or random websites, and *completely* unmonitored web forums or chatrooms? What about the ability of pharmaceutical companies to promote their products and encourage your patients to demand drugs that might not be the best option for them in your professional opinion? Do you have more people saying "Well Wikipedia said...?" or "I want that purple pill!"
And to be honest, stupid people are always going to read crap somewhere on the internet and believe it. The least we can do is *try* to make it correct.
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Guest (glg3)
Wiki beats DTC
Patients are getting their "information/facts" from all sorts of sources. At this point, I'd rather have them reading up on diseases, remedies, etc. in the Wikipedia, than listening to the Direct to consumer advertising that is so prevelant. Canada and other more rational (read - unwilling to let big Pharma do what ever they like) countries don't allow DTC commercials about purple pills and other - "ask your physician" remedies. One possibility is to have MDs contribute and edit the Wikipedia - rather than whine and complain.... It wouldn't take much time if a good number of Docs got involved.
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Guest (Proteus)
Why Wikipedia
Wikipedia information, specialy for technical articles is or should be written and updated by people with the degrees and knowledge on the matters described. But one sure thing is that Wiki is more often updated than many general physicians do update their personal knowledge.
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