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The Wikipedia Paradox: can Wikipedia ever be taken seriously as an academic resource?

Imagine it is Sunday night and you have a paper due the next day on Hannah Arendt and the role of Nazi bureaucrats in the Holocaust. You desperately click on the first Google result for Hannah Arendt, but it only contains some biographical information and a list of her works including Eichmann in Jerusalem. This isn’t good enough you say, I need the complete text of the book now and an in-depth analysis of her arguments now! Just when you’re beginning to think you’ll never finish your paper, you stumble on to the Wikipedia page with a link to the full text of Eichmann in Jerusalem and links to Adolph Eichmann and some other high ranking Nazi officials. Wikipedia seems to be the answer to many students’ prayers; but how reliable is the information and what are the rhetorical structures at work in the construction of this knowledge?

First of all, Wikipedia utilizes a collaborative software program called a ‘wiki.’ Wikis were designed to provide quick access to information, hence ‘wiki’ from the Hawaiian word for quick. Wikis can be utilized in many different ways, but basically they operate by allowing many users to contribute to a webpage. Using simple html language contributors can link words in the articles to the page about that word, each page keeps a history of the changes made and who is responsible. Regardless of whether someone is a registered user, Wikipedia stores the IP address of each person who edits a page. Wikipedia creators Larry Sanger and Jimmy Wales combined the terms ‘wiki’ and ‘encyclopedia’ to name their revolutionary source of information which takes advantage of the capabilities of the wiki program. Wikipedia’s name implies that the information provided on its site should be of citable encyclopedic quality. Wikipedia has specific instructions for creating an entry; these include writing from a ‘neutral’ point of view citing evidence from reliable and verifiable sources. The difficult word for Wikipedia to define is ‘neutral.’ In our readings from this semester, Richard Weaver suggests that the neutral would be the ultimate source of rhetorical force which is exempted from review. The neutral, like Jacques Lacan’s phallus is difficult to define because our rhetorical worlds are constructed around its power. All knowledge is the result of a well formed argument and therefore political. Uncovering Wikipedia’s notion of neutral would also help to understand the political forces working to make the information into knowledge.

Wikipedia is just one of the many useful components from the Wikimedia Foundation, a non profit organization based in St. Petersburg, Florida and founded by Jimmy Wales and his partner Larry Sanger. After finishing graduate school, according to [Stacy Schiff’s article], Jimmy Wales set out to test Friedrich Hayek’s theory that truth is established when knowledge is pooled. His original intent was to create a free website with peer-reviewed academic journal articles. Wales seemingly achieves this utopian egalitarian dream in several ways, obtaining funds relatively free of commercial interest, transparency on the foundation and the inner workings of the organization, and free open access and editing to anyone online. The Wikimedia Foundation keeps its non-profit tax status surviving mostly off charitable donations from its users and federal education grants. By shunning funds from advertisers and large companies, Wikimedia seems to keep Wikipedia free of private interests which might influence the neutrality of its articles. Wikimedia provides a great deal of transparency by providing a PDF copy of its tax filings and a complete set of links to each administrator’s page. On the surface, Wikipedia appears to achieve its goal of ‘neutral point of view’ articles. But there are several factors which reveal weaknesses in rhetorical force of Wikipedia’s knowledge.

Wikipedia appears to be a more democratic source of information since anyone, even unregistered users, can edit the pages. Wales uses several metaphors to reinforce Wikipedia’s rhetorical strength as a worldly and democratic source of information. Wikipedia’s symbol is an unfinished globe formed by puzzle pieces with various mathematical and linguistic symbols on each piece. This unfinished globe probably means Wikipedia will never finish its task of collecting information in every language. But these metaphors are just as deceiving as Hitler’s all encompassing disease metaphors for the Jewish people. In truth, according to Wikipedia’s page there are over 4 million registered users and only 75,000 of them are contributors. These statistics are also suspect because Wikipedia’s edit counts do not record how much a user contributes to the site, only the number of times they change a page. The change can be as small as italicizing a title or as large as adding new page. The actual number of contributors is most likely inflated, meaning there are even less people contributing to the wealth of information. Another limitation to the democratic compilation of reliable information is computer and internet access. Even in the United States, the world’s richest nation, in 2003 the U.S. census bureau found that 70 million or 62% of households had at least one computer and 55% of American households had internet access. According to the global statistics of geohive.org, America now has about 223,810,000 PCs while the countries with the largest populations such as China have only 52,990,000 PCs and India has only 13,030,000 PCs. Topping that off the five richest countries are the United States, Japan, Germany, China, and the United Kingdom. Meaning China may be the GDP fourth richest nation and have close to seven billion people, but only four out of every one hundred people have a computer. India has only one in one hundred people have a computer. It appears that Wikipedia does not keep statistics by nation but by language, this is also misleading because most of the world’s poorest nations are in Africa, Asia, and South America. These countries were once colonies of European countries so they speak English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, and even Dutch, therefore it is not possible to determine outright the amount of participation from everyone around the world.

Wikipedia’s reliability has constantly been called into question. As a result of its open format Wikipedia’s pages are always at risk for abuse and vandalism. Since an administrator cannot possibly pour though hundreds of pages a day looking for errors, Wikipedia uses automated software programs called ‘bots’ to resolve these problems. Bots can do everything from fixing punctuation to them more insidious deleting of profane language. There are inherent problems with automatic editing. What happens if the profanity is in a quotation and the actual language is altered by a bot? And what would the consensus consider profanity? Bots must have a proposal page and be approved by a ‘bureaucrats’ who have demonstrated themselves as capable judges of consensus and have requested to become administrators. It seems that Wikipedia has responded to the threats to ‘knowledge’ in the same pattern of bureaucratic top-down control over knowledge. Despite all of the policing robots, serious cases of defamation (John Seigenthaler Sr. falsely linked to the assassinations of both John and Robert Kennedy) and clever hoaxes (NPA personality theory) and who knows what else continues to exist on Wikipedia.

Wikipedia does have many positive attributes. Wikipedia serves its purpose of providing free quick general information for the average consumer. Its scientific pages are kept very current and are valuable sources of new information. The Wikipedia interface is fairly simple and does not require much time and memory to load. Encyclopedia Britannica’s page is full of videos and extra crap that takes too long to load. Wikipedia also has many advantages over traditional encyclopedias such as the Encyclopedia Britannica and Encarta; Wikipedia is free and has enormous number of entries on even the most pedestrian topics. As of April 29, 2007, Wikipedia recorded having 1,759,567 pages. As for Britannica, it has only 122,264 articles. Encyclopedia Britannica allows users to view partial entries, but charges an $80 annual membership for full access. Britannica has caught itself up with on-line technology by creating web pages for each of its entries, yet Britannica’s pages lack the linking of terms and the depth on information that makes Wikipedia so great. In terms of becoming a serious academic resource, Wikipedia’s science and math articles are it’s strongest area, mostly because scientific knowledge is not seen as politically debatable as the arts and humanities. In conclusion paradoxically Wikipedia could one day become as reliable as the Britannica if it could just get everyone in the world to agree on what to believe.

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