Every webbie has a flaw, but check this out! (Look below.)
Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia that anyone can edit, was founded on 15 January 2001 by Jimmy Wales and some would say it has been all uphill from there. From humble beginnings as a small reference website with a tiny group of devoted users, Wikipedia has since blossomed into the world’s largest and some would say best online encyclopedia.
Wikipedia has grown greatly since its founding, and now has 1,758,602 articles in the English language alone, an unprecedented number for any encyclopedia. In fact, this statistic is changing as I type. In keeping with the founder’s vision of giving every single person on the planet free access to the sum of all human knowledge, Wikipedia is also available in a full 251 languages.
Quality, not quantity, some may say. From this perspective, however, Wikipedia is also an excellent source of information—it has been shown in a study by a scientific journal to be only marginally less accurate than Britannica, with an average of one more serious error per article, a total of four, than the renowned paper encyclopedia. Also, errors in Wikipedia are swiftly spotted and corrected by any of the millions of Wikipedians and hundreds or even thousands of Wikipediholics who edit Wikipedia. Not only that, but since Britannica is widely perceived as a more established, authoritative source of information than Wikipedia, about which many still have doubts, information in Britannica is far more likely to be taken at face value, instead of being clarified through following links in the External Links section and/or doing further research, something brought about by many people’s skepticism of Wikipedia. Wikipedia is intended as a starting point for research—those truly interested in finding information should not depend on any encyclopedias alone.
Disputes on Wikipedia might be imagined as uncontrollable by many because of Wikipedia’s wiki nature, but in reality when disputes do spiral out of control, which is uncommon because of Wikipedia policies such as “civility” and “no personal attacks”, users are advised to use conflict resolution procedures, such as requests for comment, mediation and, as a last resort, arbitration.
How does Wikipedia maintain its relative accuracy and reliability despite inaccuracies inadvertently inserted by well-meaning editors, drive-by vandalism by unhelpful editors and test edits by new users? The secret lies in the sheer size of the Wikipedia community. Wikipedia has over 4 million registered users, many of whom patrol individual pages and/or Recent Changes, Wikipedia’s list of, well, recent changes. These Wikipedians, not to mention the uncounted number of anonymous users editing Wikipedia under IP addresses, revert unhelpful edits, generally within five minutes according to a 2002 study, and sometimes leave a message on the editor’s talk page. New editors are left a polite message informing them of the change, telling them that testing should be done in the Sandbox to avoid interfering with encyclopedia articles, and good-faith editors are sometimes notified as well, although this is not perceived as necessary given the inevitability of the editing process. Vandals are given warnings on their talk pages, according to a strict system of vandalism warnings, consisting of four warnings before an administrator implements a block, a technical measure to stop that user or IP address from editing Wikipedia for a certain amount of time, ranging from one second, generally only used in situations when Wikipedia is experiencing technical difficulties with blocks and unblocks, to forever.
Of course, some administrators abuse their powers, which is why blocked users can still appeal on their talk pages by leaving the {{unblock}} template, and other administrators can unblock users they believe to be unfairly blocked.
Another problem Wikipedia faces is biases and subjectivities. To combat this problem, Wikipedia has an NPOV (neutral point of view) policy, which stipulates that encyclopedia articles must be neutral and present points of view fairly and without advocating one position over another. If the flaws in one position are presented, the flaws in the others should be as well. Truly balanced coverage generally includes rebuttals.
However, recent incidents, some say, have shed light on alleged flaws in Wikipedia. For example, the 2005 Seigenthaler incident, in which an anonymous user, later identified as Brian Chase, deliberately added libellous information about John Seigenthaler, Sr, a well-known writer and journalist. The “biography” as it stood for several months—a virtually unheard-of lifespan for vandalism on Wikipedia—insinuated that he had a connection in both Kennedy assassinations. This mistake, when spotted, was regretted by Wikipedians, but was taken by critics as being indicative of a fundamental flaw in Wikipedia. (In response to this incident, Wikipedia adopted a restriction on article creation, allowing only registered users to create new articles, although everyone could still edit. However, talk and user talk pages are technically not articles since they contain no encyclopedia content.)
Indeed, the wiki concept has been severely criticised by many as being fundamentally incompatible with that of an encyclopedia. According to critics, it undermines any remote semblance of the authoritativeness central to an encyclopedia. But theoretical logic is one thing, and practical reality is another. Despite being an incredibly radical and revolutionary project, Wikipedia has actually achieved a level of accuracy comparable to that of Britannica and an article count far exceeding that of the latter.
Then there was the Essjay controversy. Essjay was one of the most respected and trusted users on Wikipedia. He was an administrator, bureaucrat, and holder of checkuser (IP-to-username-and-vice-versa sockpuppet checking) and oversight (removal of individual edits from an article’s history for special reasons) privileges. He also claimed to be a 40-odd private-university tenured professor holding doctoral degrees in theology and canon, citing his credentials in content disputes and thus influencing the content of Wikipedia articles with these credentials...which turned out to be fake! This was discovered when a discrepancy was found between his Wikia profile and his Wikipedia one. Eventually, he revealed that he was a 24-year-old community college dropout. This occurred from February to March 2007.
Critics claim that this incident exposes yet another flaw in Wikipedia, that of the readily available option of anonymity. The problem is that such objections miss the point: Essjay is one user, albeit one of the most trusted ones on Wikipedia. Wikipedia has 4,252,336 users, a number that is changing even as I type this essay. Even if there have been other cases of identity fabrication in the past, they still constitute no more than a tiny minority of Wikipedians. In any case, both critics and the Wikipedian community has been obsessing about the scandal for way too long. In the words of a Wikipedian who commented on Essjay’s user talk page, “Wikipedia has five pillars [Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, has a neutral point of view, is free content, has a code of conduct and does not have other firm rules], and Essjay isn’t one of them.”
Furthermore, in their eagerness to kick Essjay while he is down, Wikipedia critics may go overboard and fabricate things about the controversy. One notable example of this is Daniel Brandt, founder of the anti-Wikipedia Wikipedia Watch website. He claimed that “Wikipedia has hidden the evidence of its latest WikiScandal”, apparently because Essjay’s user and user talk pages had been blanked and replaced with a farewell message; however, this was necessary because many Wikipedians, disappointed in Essjay’s deceit, had been flaming Essjay on his talk page even after his departure in early March this year. Also, even when Essjay left in shame and reduced his user talk page to a farewell message, other Wikipedians left links to previous revisions of his user talk page, complete with all the flaming and personal attacks, which Essjay was against removing while he was still on Wikipedia. This is clearly inconsistent with the image “hidden the evidence” portrays. Leaving all the flaming on Essjay’s user talk page would be undesirable due to the fact that a significant fraction of the messages left on Essjay’s talk page before and after his departure violated Wikipedia’s policy against personal attacks and civility, since many users were unable to come to terms with the fact that one of the most trusted users on Wikipedia had systematically lied about his identity from his first edit.
Some critics also claim that protecting pages is incompatible with Wikipedia’s wiki nature, arguing that it is self-defeating, but this is not the case. Protection is actively discouraged on Wikipedia, and is only employed in extreme situations, such as pages undergoing edit wars (when two or more users repeatedly revert each other’s edits in an attempt to make sure their edits prevail), or pages constantly being vandalised. The vast majority of Wikipedia’s pages are open to editing.
Furthermore, many complaints about Wikipedia by critics fall into the “my contributions were mercilessly edited” category. What these people do not seem to realise is that this is fundamental to Wikipedia. Wikipedia actively encourages bold editing. If Wikipedians had not edited Wikipedia boldly during Wikipedia’s early days Wikipedia would have gone the way of Nupedia, an early project that was a complete failure, publishing only 24 articles in three and a half years due to its rigorous peer-review process. Indeed, this principle is now enshrined in official guideline status (Wikipedia:Be bold in updating pages, a prominent and oft-quoted page in the Wikipedia namespace). If they insist on editing Wikipedia without first understanding Wikipedia’s policies and guidelines and calling Wikipedia unreasonable when editors react to their constant violations of Wikipedia policy, of course they will be unsatisfied with their Wikipedia experience. Quite a number of Wikipedia critics do not understand Wikipedia policy, and a great number have gotten banned or blocked from editing Wikipedia due to repeatedly flouting policies. They then go off-wiki to complain about Wikipedia; many people echo their sentiments because they themselves do not understand Wikipedia and are fooled by the appeal to emotion inherent in the negativity these critics insist on spreading around.
Even if some of these problems still remain on Wikipedia, Wikipedia has still risen above all these difficulties to become one of the most popular websites on the Internet, ranking at least 11th, and once rising to 8th. The success of Wikipedia is an amazing sight, given the sheer number of difficulties Wikipedia had to overcome.