Nicholson Baker has a great article in the March 20 issue of the New York Review of Books on the "Charms of Wikipedia." He highlights that Wikipedia has flourished in large part because it’s fun to be an editor, and that part of the fun is the ongoing war between editors of good will and vandals, or people who take advantage of the site’s open and egalitarian editing policies to do things like replace the text of the article on aging with "Aging is what you get when you get freakin old old old." Baker notes that this happened on December 20, 2007, and that it was undone very quickly by vigilant Wikipedians.
Last week I discussed with my MBA students the online, freely available HBS case on Wikipedia that I co-wrote with Karim Lakhani. As part of the homework for case discussion I asked all my students to become Wikipedia editors, and to report what happened to the edits they made — did they persist unchanged, or were they further modified or rolled back?
I didn’t tell them to engage in vandalism but a couple of them did so in order, I imagine, to test the site’s vigilance. My favorite example was a student’s addition of ‘jellybeans’ to the list of foods commonly eaten by the mongoose. Within minutes, he reported, the word disappeared and he heard from a zoologist Wikipedian offering information on both the animal’s diet and the encyclopedia’s policies on citing sources.
Other students made edits that were less overtly wrong, but still inappropriate. One added to the article on Dubai an uncredited assertion that over 20% of the world’s construction cranes were in the Emirate. He also saw his edit removed, and received information about attribution and sourcing policies.
I should stress that most of the class edited in good will. Lots reported that because the articles they were interested in were so comprehensive they really couldn’t find much to add. Some, though, found omissions that seemed glaring. The article on Wade Boggs contained little or no mention of his affair with Margo Adams, its messy aftermath, and related press coverage. One of my students added this information in a nicely constructed paragraph.
Overall, our experience confirmed Baker’s conclusion that:
"The "unhelpful" or "inappropriate"—sometimes stoned, racist, violent, metalheaded—changes are quickly fixed by human stompers and algorithmicized helper bots. It’s a game. Wikipedians see vandalism as a problem, and it certainly can be, but a Diogenes-minded observer would submit that Wikipedia would never have been the prodigious success it has been without its demons."
Still, as everyone acknowledges it is not a perfect or error-free resource, and students each year find some strange content. Last spring a student pointed out that the current (at that time) page for United Technologies CEO George David was almost entirely a goof. I found it astonishing that his PR staff had allowed this to persist. This year a sharp-eyed student noticed that the entry for sex researcher Robert Kolodny at present contains some strange text in the third paragraph. So the demons persist.
As do the deletionists. The only student last week to understand the true intention behind the assignment created an entry on me. It was speedily removed.
{ 23 comments… read them below or add one }
Hey Andy,
I miss your class and enjoy reading your blog. I remember last year, one of the anecdotes on this case that stuck in my mind was that a student had tried to modify the entry on Anna Nicole Smith, just moments after he heard the breaking news on her death. Astonishingly, he found that some wikipedian had beat him to it…
Best Regards
I agree with this post for the most part. But I am beginning to be more critical of Wikipedia as I increase my usage of the site. Wikipedia is fine for black and white topics, but others, such as topics on the soft sciences, personal opinion and emotion rule the day. As a Chemical engineer, I know the power and limits of science, I had to deal with them on a daily basis, but you cannot help but read passages on some biology or psychology subjects and found passages with wording so strong that you know they violate the scientific method. However, if you try to edit, you have a flurry of emotionally charges responses based on his or her own personal dogma that fighting the fight is simply not worth it. I even had someone try to “prove” his or her scientific beliefs with a court ruling years ago, as if the laws of the universe are determined by lawyers and judges.
On “why” this behavour exists, I think it stems from the greater rigors of sciences like physics vs. some other sciences. For the most part, in physics, if there is one piece of evidence that contradicts a theory, the theory is wrong, end of discussion. Other sciences that are based on randomness and probabilities, far more gray area, thus contain divergent opinions and strong emotions. Science is best left to the textbooks, not wikipedia.
Having blabbed on long enough, from a business perspective, overall sensitivity on business topic is probably far less, thus emotion shouldn’t be as much of a concern, so the integrity of business wikis should be far higher than wikipedia itself.
A friend of mine once spent an entire day “fixing up wikipedia”, thinking he was doing the world a service.
The next day, he went to check on his changes, and found that almost all the changes had been reverted to the old versions. He was not happy at wasting his time!
I think you have to be careful when reading and writing for Wikipedia. My website was getting a lot of hits from a thread relating to The Sopranos TV show so I paid all the pages a visit to see why (I don’t post on Wikipedia anymore).
Looking through the change log where people were visiting me from I found that two users were arguing about the addition of some information relating to an episode of the show. Someone had found some trivia on my site, used it and linked back to my site, the second user had deleted it claiming that the source was unreliable.
There’s no point in getting into the ins and outs of the argument between the two users. But the thing that made me laugh (and stopped me using Wikipedia as a reference for information) was that the information they was arguing over had originally came from……. (you guessed it) Wikipedia lol. Before you ask I had noted references etc on the article.
I would love to see a statistical analysis to determine exactly how many editors it takes to achieve an alpha level of 0.05 to be confident that wikipedia is socially neutral. Now how you determine a mean amount of editors required for a topic to be unbiased, the amount of topics an editor can handle, and the resulting standard deviation….well, I have no idea, but I have a hunch the the good people of wikipedia do not have nearly enough editors.
Wiki is amazing, from an SEO angle the design and crawl structure is about as good as it gets. The Alexa ranking is off the charts, it’s a sticky site that is just getting bigger. If your ever stuck for something wiki has the news on it, my kids love it!
I’ve seen quite a wide range of opinions on this from academic professionals lately. While I wouldn’t want to use Wikipedia as a source, it is pretty good for finding sources & public domain graphics.
Some people are rabidly against it, I found this quote in the comments of an article about Wikipedia in higher education: “Wacky WickiÂ’s will continue to drink from the poisoned well and infecting academia like a cancer.” I don’t really understand the anger, Wiki’s are just like another tool.
Wiki is amazing, from an SEO angle the design and crawl structure is about as good as it gets. The Alexa ranking is off the charts, it’s a sticky site that is just getting bigger. If your ever stuck for something wiki has the news on it, my kids love it!
It’s hard not to refer to Wikipedia when it’s often the first results you get in a search. True some of its content needs to be verified especially for academic topics but on the whole, it’s invaluable for fast reference on just about any subject.
I stop linking to WIKI while wiki add “nofollow” attribute. It’s become a Black Hole, collecting PR
Wikipedia is a real treasure of internet, moreover it’s free to use for evryone. But, there is a big problem with free adding of information. A lot of users try to spam wikipedia and fill it with trash. It’s extremely popular in russian-speaking wikipedia. So it should be arranged a skilled editorial team to save and protect this online encyclopedia.
Wikipedia can bring a lot of traffic to our blog or site. this is an excellent movement made by you.
90% of the time when I search for something on google, I get a wikipedia result on the first page. If I want to check the wikipedia artcile on some topic I’ll go directly there, there’s no need to search on google. Soon all we’ll see in google results will be wikipedia pages, and this will be the end of google and wikipedia too.
I cited Wikipedia in several instances in Mechanisms. I included the following note in the book:
“In several places Mechanisms references Wikipedia as a scholarly source of record, usually for some specific point of technical documentation. Information technology is among the most reliable content domains on Wikipedia, given the high interest of such topics among Wikiepdia’s readership and the consequent scrutiny they tend to attract. Moreover, the ability to examine Page Histories on Wikipedia allows a user to recover the editorial record of a particular entry, with every revision to the text date- and time-stamped and versioned. Attention to these editorial histories can aid in allowing users to exercise sound judgment as to whether or not the information before them at any given moment is controversial to its audience, and I have availed myself of that functionality when deciding whether or not to rely on Wikipedia.
“Wikipedia itself, whose developers leverage their software’s content modeling to expose document histories with a precision, transparency, and granularity unprecedented in printed publications outside the realm of genetic editions and textual scholarship, is a working example of the mechanisms I discuss herein.”
In additional to information technology, which I mention above, Wikipedia is also indispensable (and usually authoritative) on pop culture. Anyone working on the Sopranos or The Wire, for instance, would find a wealth of material not otherwise available, including exhaustive episode by episode plot guides.
Wikipedia is one of the most important resource. I tend to key in wikipedia + ‘keyword’ when I need to have a detail explanation on whatever I’m looking for. Especially important when it comes to biographys of famous people.
Though open to edits, I must say the accuracy is almost 95% accurate as they have internal monitoring as well. So it is almost 99% audited by another team of people.
Hey MBA Colleges in India,
I thought your note on Wikipedia was really sharp, so hence its appearance in the post. (I seem to be mentioning you a lot lately, but you keep putting out good stuffÂ…) Thanks for adding the bit about pop culture, another important point. Many of the Wikipedia citations I looked at were indeed about pop culture.
Hello Andy,
I wonder whether Wikipedia is likely to be cited more often in books than in journal articles? Books tend to be broader, more general in scope, and are thus more likely to need to cite an encyclopedia-type article. 58 references doesnÂ’t really seem that big a number, although the rate of increase is certainly interesting.
I will say that I hate the ubiquitous language about whether to “cite” Wikipedia, which even you use, sir. My feeling is that whoever consults it should cite it, whether student or scholar. (With, of course, the rather large and fuzzy exception for general knowledge that doesn’t need to be cited.) What ought to be at issue is whether to consult Wikipedia. I always tell my students to do a “Works Consulted” list rather than a “Works Cited” list, partly for this reason. The bibliography, however named, should be an honest record of the sources that formed one’s thinking, provided so that the reader can 1) judge the authority of the sources and 2) retrieve the sources.
At first, I ignored the mistakes. This was only Wikipedia, after all. But the landscape of knowledge has changed since then, and I have joined the club. Wikipedia should always be taken with a pinch of salt. But the more we contribute and revise, the less salt we will need. We are all Wikipedists now.
Wiki has grown so much and so fast that they dominate almost ever search results page that I have seen!
I have learned a lot through watching this growth and have started taking notes on their linking structure and implementing it with great success for many of my clients!
This has been an excellent read and I hope to read all of your posts very soon! Thanks!
I agree with this post for the most part. But I think you have to be careful when reading and writing for Wikipedia.
Wikipedia is a real treasure of internet, moreover itÂ’s free to use for evryone. I agree.
Great post, really help me alot. Thanks.
Cheers,
Buat Duit Dengan Blog
Such a very nice and informative post. Wikipedia is a real treasure of internet. thanks for sharing the great ideas….
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