Every so often there's a column in the Times which says: shock, horror, probe, not everything you find on Wikipedia is true.
Wikipedia is written by amateurs! They are rubbish! They are unprofessional, biased, and tell lies!
As one of Wikipedia's many contributors, I find that really quite offensive. I contribute on matters that I do know about and quite often spend some time checking sources before writing. Many of the other people I know who contribute to Wikipedia are scholars, journalists, or practitioners (eg investment bankers) who believe in 'giving something back' in terms of pro bono work.
Admittedly, they are probably contributing to a post on Robert Herrick, Wagner's Die Feen, cosmatesque marble work or the Black-Scholes formula, and probably not to one about Britney Spears.
Yes, there are problems on Wikipedia. But let's look at how it addresses them.
- Requesting references, whether from news media, authoritative web sites, scholarly research, or other publications.
- 'Talk' pages. I actually believe in some ways Wikipedia does a better job than other media. On the question of Western Sahara, for instance, publications like the CIA world factbook will tell you who 'owns' Western Sahara. But the Wikipedia discussion page tells you what the issues are. There is no 'right' answer - in that way I believe Wikipedia represents the real world more fully than many more authoritative sources. (And anyway - if we can't trust Wikipedia, what makes you want to trust the CIA?!!)
- Continuous editing. Okay, that can descend to flame war. But at least it means errors can be addressed in real time - not next time the book goes into print in a couple of years' time.
Hm. Like the Lancet, which was responsible for deeply flawed research on MMR jabs being published.
What is Wikipedia if not a peer-reviewed publication? It's just the definition of 'peers' that is different.
And quis custodiet ipsos custodes in the matter of peer reviewing?
(Let's remember that it was professional, accredited, peer-reviewed psychologists and psychotherapists in the 1950s and 1960s USA who defined homosexuality as a disease. Not just that - women who did not conform to feminine stereotypes were often 'treated' for their 'gender misalignment'. From today's perspective that looks like a mumbo-jumbo rationale for a full scale assault on the individual's human right to self-determination.)
I am still waiting for a mainstream journalist to point out the real truth of Wikipedia - which is that information cannot be polarised into 'good' and 'bad', but comes in an almost infinite number of degrees of creditworthiness. And that we should actually learn to interpret and evaluate information - not be encouraged to trust one source absolutely and distrust another.
Perhaps because, if we all learned to evaluate and interpret information, we might not trust what was in the newspapers...
For me, it's the fact that Wikipedia accepts its own fallibility, and signposts it by flagging up disputed terms and statements, that makes it such a potent force. (The only UK newspaper I can think of that does this is the Guardian, with its readers' editor. It's not a matter of 'corrections', right/wrong, as in other papers, but of 'How should we have reported this'... and it makes the assumption that readers are grown-ups with critical minds of their own.)