The Media's Attitude towards and Wikipedia

Without a doubt, Wikipedia is big. So big that even the bastion of print and online journalism is opening the floodgates to Wikipedia's content. Sure, it can be unreliable, but that hasn't stopped people from using it as a source: a quick check of recent news with "according to wikipedia" in the text produces 383 results from the past month alone. That said, these sorts of sources are usually frowned upon, and while the text of the encyclopedia may be used, it's not always cited (better to not say where you got it?)

But what about other media attitudes? Towards its policies, towards its content, towards its editors, towards Wikipedia in general?

Not surprisingly, more contentious material on Wikipedia is likely to earn scorn from all sides of political or social prisms. Take the recent article from WorldNetDaily, "Wikipedia Scrubs Obama eligibility". Here the writer is accusing writers of harboring a pro-Obama bias by removing mentions of his controversial associates, such as former Weatherman leader William Ayers or fringe preacher Jeremiah Wright, which as the article claims rightly became large issues during the 2008 presidential campaign.

This highlights one main flaw in coverage of Wikipedia: lack of understanding about its guidelines and policies. Ever since a well-publicized incident where a man was accused of having been investigated for the JFK assassination (see Seigenthaler incident), Wikipedia has had a strict policy of removing contentious material on biographies of living persons, including having the motto "do no harm". The content WND criticizes as being "scrubbed" from the Obama entry is well-covered on Wikipedia: more than 2000 words on the Ayers issue alone, in its own article, for example. It's just due to biography concerns that this content is elaborated on in its own article away from the main biography.

In a similar way, journalists for the video game magazine Edge said that Wikipedia's coverage of the forerunner to MMOG, MUDs, is woefully inaccurate and incomplete because it excludes much of the primary sources from the genre's creators and such. (True, many sources they mention wouldn't be included as "reliable sources", but as long as people are considered experts in the field, self-published material by them would be permissible, so the main thrust of their argument is weak.)

More uniformly negative attitudes towards Wikipedia exist in regards to its notability guidelines, the pages that dictate what content merits inclusion. Timothy Noah, a writer for Slate magazine, found his biography on Wikipedia under threat of deletion. He wrote an article in response "I'm Being Wiki-Wacked", where he questioned why Wikipedia has limits on content at all. The following passage lays down his claims pretty succintly:

"We know why other encyclopedias need to limit the topics they cover. If they're on paper, they're confined by space. If they're on the Web, they're confined by staff size. But Wikipedia commands what is, for all practical purposes, infinite space and infinite manpower. The drawback to Wikipedia's ongoing collaboration with readers is that entries are vulnerable to error, clumsy writing and sabotage. The advantage is that Wikipedia can draw on the collective interests and knowledge of its hundreds of thousands of daily visitors to cover, well, anything. To limit that scope based on notions of importance and notability seems self-defeating. If Wikipedia publishes a bio of my cleaning lady, that won't make it any harder to field experts to write and edit Wikipedia's bio of Albert Einstein. So why not let her in? Granted, there are a few practical limits to covering any and all topics, "important" or not. One is privacy. Assuming that my cleaning lady were neither a public figure nor part of any larger story, it would be difficult to justify posting her bio against her will. Another limit is accuracy. The bio's assertions about my cleaning lady would have to be independently verifiable from trustworthy sources made available to readers. Otherwise Wikipedia's vast army of volunteer fact-checkers would be unable to find out whether the bio was truthful." -(Noah, 02-25-2007)

There is some practical truth to Noah's comments. Wikipedia can always buy more servers, and as long as people donate money it's not like they have to worry about running out of room (the 'pedia long ago passed the scope any encyclopedia with a legion of staffers could ever assemble). Adding a bio about Noah's cleaning lady wouldn't make it harder to find Einstein. Noah also mentions the BLP policy (privacy) and verifiability policy which are core to Wikipedia. Why do we (wikipedia) need any other sort of notability standard? Indeed, that's an argument that is trumpeted by those on the Wiki would would like to see it abolished.

To a large extent, you could dismiss Noah's prime motivation as simply petulance; he was threatened with deletion, he wanted payback. But it's also true many other publications and writers have similar attitudes towards notability, seeing it as a place where meanie administrators kick sand in the faces of new editors and smash their sand castles.

Part of the problem is that all this coverage (see other examples here, here, and here) is a bit skewed. Rather than objective facts, the articles rely on first-person coverage-reporters who see deletion of their articles as unfair, for example, or who become involved in deletion arguments, or else interviews with editors. For example, one user who began editing in 2002 sums up the war of "deletionism" vs. "inclusionism" (as the two factions are roughly divided into) this way:

"I think this is more of a conflict between the Wikipedians who have been part of the project for some time versus a group that has not been part of the project as long. [Most members of the old guard, he explained, had at one point or another helped delete articles that they later realized should have been kept.] The newer members haven't made mistakes like this enough times to understand that caution is a virtue."

That's not entirely true. I've been an editor since 2005, for example, and created articles that I now realize probably didn't meet criteria and would go ahead and delete now. In fact, it is more likely that when it comes to articles about fictional subjects (characters from a television show or game, for example), newer editors unaccustomed to Wikipedia rules are more likely to advocate inclusion based on a "usefulness" criteria, much like Noah expoused: "It's not *hurting* anyone, and someone will find it useful, so why not?"

Unfortunately, objective data for the debate is sorely lacking. Some hardcore inclusionists (the kind who want to see notability go the way of the Dodo) use the press coverage indicated above as "evidence", but aside from using press sources as sources, it's dubious to use their reporting as bellweathers of popular sentiment for how the Wiki should be run. At the same time, the encyclopedia doesn't run in a vacuum, and at some point the goal of the whole project has to be reevaluated or reaffirmed. Among a list of "what Wikipedia is Not" comes the following germane lines: "Wikipedia is not a indiscriminate collection of facts", "Wikipedia is not a directory", "Wikipedia is not a democracy". While it might use an open system of editing, Wikipedia is hardly a place where voting gets you anywhere (in theory). But the project might have grown too large for a consensus of principles to be reaffirmed and reapplied to itself. Currently, pure numbers (by unscientific voluntary response polls and surveys conducted recently on the project) indicate that while few want to do away with notability altogether, significant elements are on each side of the fence, wanting to either abolish it entirely or strengthen it by turning notability into an official policy rather than a guideline. The wiki-war over whether fiction articles should have to meet the general notability guideline of multiple secondary sources has fallen apart once again, meaning that intervention from the encyclopedia's high court (the Arbitration Committee) might be necessary to force a mandate one way or another. While the future of Wikipedia is unsure, what is known is that no matter what it does, the press is watching... and is ready to complain.