Wikipedia, the “free, online encyclopedia that anyone can edit” is probably familiar to many readers. It’s the resource of last resort to many a student who need to rapidly assimilate vast amounts of information in short amounts of time. Who among us hasn’t turned to Wikipedia to study a list of terms the night before a test? But is this practice really “safe,” in academic terms?
Wikipedia is amazingly successful as an experiment in collecting and organizing reference information. It has more than 800,000 articles in English, and many thousands more in every major language, all of them contributed for free by a dedicated army of volunteers. Wikipedia has proved that enough people want to have a part in contributing to the world’s collective knowledge as to produce a fairly impressive result. So impressive that it has created a debate surrounding Wikipedia’s status as an encyclopedia, a title Britannica and others obviously do not like seeing bestowed lightly.
Wikipedia has lately achieved a lot of bad press, questioning the site’s standards of accuracy and susceptibility to libel. A former aid to Bobby Kennedy, John Seigenthaler, Jr., was falsely accused of being linked to the Kennedy assassination in a Wikipedia entry about him, a scandal that many have cited as proof that Wikipedia cannot be trusted.
It is true that there is no formal mechanism for ensuring the accuracy of information on Wikipedia, which relies essentially on the goodwill of its contributors to police themselves and each other. Furthermore, its attempt to achieve encyclopedic authoritativeness while claiming an exemption from libel claims stinks of having their cake and eating it too.
However, the larger principle behind Wikipedia-that its contributors form a kind of collective conciseness constantly growing and self-repairing-has merit. While anyone may put erroneous information into Wikipedia, it is likely to be found and corrected in time, and the trend within the Wikipedia hive mind is overwhelmingly towards breadth, accuracy, and neutrality.
It is more than just traditionalist academics and victims of slander that sneer at Wikipedia’s free and open architecture. It has recently, and not for the first time, become the target of China’s notorious internet censorship. Unhappy with their inability to control the content of articles on touchy subjects like “Taiwan” and “democracy,” Chinese authorities have cut off access to the encyclopedia throughout the country, leaving many Chinese students outraged and unable to continue their research, as well as unable to contribute to a serious global achievement.
What people should take away from the Wikipedia controversy is the futility of believing that any source of information can or should be trusted uncritically. A constant process of comparison, reexamination and revision is at the heart of all good research, just as it is at the heart of Wikipedia. Why shouldn’t this process, if left open and given an indefinite amount of time to run, produce excellent results? It’s certainly better than the impulse to impose the authoritative and the authoritarian, or to accept it blindly when presented.
