Friends, One of our list members sent part of the thread to Jimmy Wales. He sent a reply, with the request that it be posted to the list. I post it here. Since Jimmy does not belong to the list, please copy to him any replies directed to him. Ken Hello, air-l! I am Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia and I'd like to thank danah for pointing me to this discussion. Ken Friedman wrote:
This letter is a suggestion that you address the problem of bad information in student papers from an increasingly poor source: Wikipedia. Wikipedia is not getting better. It is getting worse.
While I certainly do think that professors should educate students about Wikipedia, and about how it is created, I must object to the idea that "Wikipedia is not getting better. It is getting worse." That's a very specific empirical claim which is fairly easy to refute: simply take a look at 100 random articles from Wikipedia, and see what those articles looked like a year ago, two years ago, three years ago. The level of increase in quality is dramatic across the board. That isn't to say that Wikipedia is yet "ready for primetime" -- it isn't. But if you're going to say that Wikipedia is _getting worse_ instead of _getting better_, I'm going to ask you to prove it.
There are now enough serious incidents of false and defamatory information in Wikipedia biographies to warrant prohibiting this as a reference source in universities and university-level professional schools. The same is true of inaccurate or false assertions in many articles.
I would say it a different way: Wikipedia (and Britannica) ought to have been prohibited as a reference source in universities and university-level professional schools all along. This is what I tell students who write to me whining that they got an "F" on their paper for citing Wikipedia. :-) But what I would say is that there are encouraging signs that within another year or two, Wikipedia may have finally reached a quality level such that it might become satisfactory as a citable source in some cases.
The problem with Wikipedia is not that the Wiki system MAY develop a solid and reliable reference work, but that in the current form, it DOES NOT. It is as easy to change an article for the worse as for the better.
Actually, it is quite difficult to make an article worse. Yes, you can do it for an instant, but the overall process is such that bad changes tend to be reverted to older versions. Since all past versions are kept forever (except for those deleted for legal reasons of course) it is trivial for the community to restore an article to it's former glory in the event that some edit war leaves it in a worse state than before. This is routine, and this is a core part of the Wiki process.
If enough of us prohibit Wikipedia as a reference source in our courses, programs, and schools, the message will eventually get through.
Of course there's a much easier and faster way to get a message through. You could just email me. :-) We're very very eager to hear from researchers with good ideas for improvement of our processes. Our goal is quite simple: Britannica or better quality. Everything else is more or less secondary. A lot of people assume that our current _process_ is our _end in itself_. That is not true. Our current process is only the _means_ to our _end_. It has always been changing, with very careful tweaks and alterations to preserve what works and eliminate what doesn't work. That process will continue until I get what I want, and believe me, it is not possible to out-elite me on what I consider to be accurate and neutral information. One of our most important community members put it this way the other day: Wikipedia is now like the first early releases of Linux which made it (barely) usable for the first time as the kernel of an operating system. As such, it was for the first time able to attract enough users to build the processes to make it into the world-class kernel that it is today. Realism about the current weaknesses of Wikipedia is critical, including realism about how much better it has already gotten, and how eager the Wikipedia community is to continue that trajectory of improvement. --Jimbo