Criticism of Wikipedia

The major points of criticism of Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia, are the claims that the principle of being open for editing by everyone makes Wikipedia unauthoritative and unreliable (see Reliability of Wikipedia), that it exhibits systemic bias, and that its group dynamics hinder its goals.

The Seigenthaler and Essjay incidents caused criticism of Wikipedia's reliability and usefulness as a reference. Wikipedia has also been the subject of parody and other humorous criticism.

Criticism of the content

Robert McHenry, a former editor-in-chief of the Encyclopædia Britannica, said that Wikipedia errs in billing itself as an encyclopedia, because that word implies a level of authority and accountability that he believes cannot be possessed by an openly editable reference. McHenry argues that "the typical user doesn't know how conventional encyclopedias achieve reliability, only that they do."^[1] Andrew Orlowski expressed similar criticisms, writing that the use of the term "encyclopedia" to describe Wikipedia may lead users into believing it is more reliable than it may be.^[2]

Journalist and Wikipedia critic Andrew Orlowski.

Academics have also criticized Wikipedia for its perceived failure as a reliable source, and because Wikipedia editors may not have degrees or other credentials generally recognized in academia.^[3][4] For that reason, the use of Wikipedia is not accepted in many schools and universities in writing a formal paper, and some educational institutions have banned it as a primary source while others have limited its use to only a pointer to external sources.^[3][5][6] This criticism, however, does not only apply to Wikipedia but to encyclopedias in general – some university lecturers discourage students from citing any encyclopedia in academic work.^[7]

Some academic journals do refer to Wikipedia articles, but are not elevating it to the same level as traditional references. For instance, Wikipedia articles have been referenced in "enhanced perspectives" provided on-line in the journal Science. The first of these perspectives to provide a hyperlink to Wikipedia was "A White Collar Protein Senses Blue Light,"^[8] and dozens of enhanced perspectives have provided such links since then. The publisher of Science states that these enhanced perspectives "include hypernotes – which link directly to websites of other relevant information available online – beyond the standard bibliographic references."^[9]

Wikipedia's policies state that assertions should be supported by reliable, published sources—ideally, by peer reviewed publications.^[10] Jimmy Wales, the de facto leader of Wikipedia,^[11] stresses that encyclopedias of any type are not usually appropriate as primary sources, and should not be relied upon as authoritative.^[12]

Accuracy of information

Lack of authority

Wikipedia acknowledges that it should not be used as a primary source for research.^[13] Librarian Philip Bradley stated in an October 2004 interview with The Guardian that "the main problem is the lack of authority. With printed publications, the publishers have to ensure that their data is reliable, as their livelihood depends on it. But with something like this, all that goes out the window."^[14] Robert McHenry and Paul Vallely similarly noted that readers of Wikipedia can not know who has written the article they are reading – it may or may not have been written by an expert.^[6]

Due to lack of intrinsic authority, Wikipedia has been also criticized by Geoffrey Nunberg for relying too much on citing sources even though the said sources may not be more accurate than Wikipedia itself.^[15][16]

Comparative study on scientific articles conducted by Nature

In December 2005 the journal Nature conducted a single-blind study comparing the accuracy of a sample of articles from Wikipedia and Encyclopædia Britannica. The sample included 42 articles on scientific topics, including biographies of well-known scientists. The articles were compared for accuracy by academic reviewers that remained anonymous − a customary practice for journal article reviews. Based on their review, the average Wikipedia article contained 4 errors or omissions; the average Britannica article, 3. The study concluded: "Wikipedia comes close to Britannica in terms of the accuracy of its science entries".^[17]

Encyclopædia Britannica's initial concerns led to Nature releasing further documentation of its survey method.^[18] Based on this additional information, Encyclopædia Britannica denied the validity of the Nature study, stating that it was "fatally flawed" as the Britannica extracts were compilations that sometimes included articles written for the youth version.^[19] Nature acknowledged the compiled nature of some of the Britannica extracts, but denied that this invalidated the conclusions of the study.^[20] Encyclopædia Britannica also argued that while the Nature study showed that the error rate between the two encyclopedias was similar, a breakdown of the errors indicated that the mistakes in Wikipedia were more often the inclusion of incorrect facts, while the mistakes in Britannica were "errors of omission", making "Britannica far more accurate than Wikipedia, according to the figures".^[19]

Nature has since rejected the Britannica response^[21] and published a point-by-point response to Britannica's specific objections about alleged errors.^[22]

Lack of fact-checking on specialized topics

Inaccurate information that is not obviously false may persist in Wikipedia for a long time before it is challenged. The most prominent cases reported by mainstream media involved biographies of living people.

American journalist John Seigenthaler, object of the Seigenthaler incident.

The Seigenthaler incident demonstrated that the subject of a biographical article must sometimes fix blatant lies about his own life. In May 2005, an anonymous user edited the biographical article on American journalist and writer John Seigenthaler so that it contained several false and defamatory statements.^[23][24] The inaccurate claims went unnoticed between May and September 2005 when they were discovered by Victor S. Johnson, Jr., a friend of Seigenthaler. Wikipedia content is often mirrored at sites such as Answers.com, which means that incorrect information can be replicated alongside correct information through a number of web sources. Such information can develop a misleading authority because of its presence at such sites.^[25]

In another example, on March 2, 2007, msnbc.com reported that then-New York Senator (currently Secretary of State) Hillary Rodham Clinton had been incorrectly listed for 20 months in her Wikipedia biography as valedictorian of her class of 1969 at Wellesley College. (Hillary Rodham, the former Senator's maiden name, was not the valedictorian, though she did speak at commencement.)^[26] The article included a link to the Wikipedia edit,^[27] where the incorrect information was added on July 9, 2005. After the msnbc.com report, the inaccurate information was removed the same day.^[28] Between the two edits, the wrong information had stayed in the Clinton article while it was edited more than 4,800 times over 20 months.

Attempts to perpetrate hoaxes may not be confined to editing Wikipedia articles. In October 2005 Alan Mcilwraith, a former call center worker from Scotland created a Wikipedia article in which he claimed to be a highly decorated war hero. The article was, however, quickly identified as a hoax by other users and deleted.^[29][30]

There have also been instances of users deliberately inserting false information into Wikipedia in order to test the system and demonstrate its alleged unreliability. Gene Weingarten, a journalist, ran such a test in 2007; however it was not conclusive as the false information was promptly removed the next day by a Wikipedia editor.^[31] Wikipedia considers the deliberate insertion of false and misleading information to be vandalism.^[32]

Neutral point of view and conflicts of interest

Wikipedia regards the concept of neutral point of view (NPOV) as one of its non-negotiable principles. However it acknowledges that such concept has limitations – its policy indeed states that articles should be "as far as possible" written without bias.^[33] Mark Glaser, a journalist, also wrote that it may be an impossible ideal due to the inevitable biases of editors.^[34]

Scientific disputes

The 2005 Nature^[17] study also gave two brief examples of challenges that Wikipedian science writers purportedly faced on Wikipedia. The first concerned the addition of a section on violence to the schizophrenia article, which exhibited the view of one of the article's regular editors, neuropsychologist Vaughan Bell, that it was little more than a "rant" about the need to lock people up, and that editing it stimulated him to look up the literature on the topic.

The second dispute reported by Nature involved the climate researcher William Connolley, who was opposed by anonymous editors (Nature considered anonymous editors that did not use their real names). The topic in this second dispute was climate change; Nature reported that this dispute was far more protracted, and led to arbitration, which took three months to produce a decision. The outcome of arbitration, as reported by Nature, was a six-month parole for Connolley − during this time he was restricted to one revert per day. Connolley's opponents were reportedly banned from editing climate articles also for six months. On the other hand, the journalists Lawrence Solomon, Matthew Sheffield, and James Delingpole have argued that Wikipedia articles related to this topic are biased and controlled by a small group of participants including Connolley who do not edit in a neutral manner or may have a conflict of interest.^[35]

Exposure to political operatives and advocates

While Wikipedia policy requires articles to have a neutral point of view, it is not immune from attempts by outsiders (or insiders) with an agenda to place a spin on articles. In January 2006 it was revealed that several staffers of members of the U.S. House of Representatives had embarked on a campaign to cleanse their respective bosses' biographies on Wikipedia, as well as inserting negative remarks on political opponents. References to a campaign promise by Martin Meehan to surrender his seat in 2000 were deleted, and negative comments were inserted into the articles on U.S. Senator Bill Frist and Eric Cantor, a congressman from Virginia. Numerous other changes were made from an IP address which is assigned to the House of Representatives.^[36] In an interview, Wikipedia de facto leader Jimmy Wales^[11] remarked that the changes were "not cool."^[37] Some organizations are making efforts to correct inaccuracies.

Larry Delay and Pablo Bachelet write that from their perspective, some articles dealing with Latin American history and groups (such as the Sandinistas and Cuba) lack political neutrality and are written from a sympathetic Marxist perspective which treats socialist dictatorships favorably at the expense of alternate positions.^[38][39][40]

In April 2008, the Boston-based Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA) organized an e-mail campaign to correct perceived Israel-related biases and inconsistencies in Wikipedia.^[41] Excerpts of some of the e-mails were published in the July 2008 issue of Harper's Magazine under the title of "Candid camera".^[42] Camera argued the excerpts were unrepresentative and that it had campaigned "toward encouraging people to learn about and edit the online encyclopedia for accuracy".^[43] Five editors involved in the campaign were sanctioned by Wikipedia administrators.^[44] Israeli diplomat David Saranga said that Wikipedia is generally fair in regard to Israel. When confronted with the fact that the entry on Israel mentioned the word "occupation" nine times, whereas the entry on the Palestinian People mentioned "terror" only once, he replied

"It means only one thing: Israelis should be more active on Wikipedia. Instead of blaming it, they should go on the site much more, and try and change it."

^[45]

On August 31, 2008, The New York Times ran an article detailing the edits made to the biography of Alaska governor Sarah Palin in the wake of her nomination as running mate of Arizona Senator John McCain. During the 24 hours before the McCain campaign announcement, 30 edits, many of them flattering details, were made to the article by Wikipedia single-purpose user identity Young Trigg.^[46] This person has later acknowledged working on the McCain campaign, and having several Wikipedia user accounts.^[47]

In November 2007, libelous accusations were made against two politicians from southwestern France, Jean-Pierre Grand and Hélène Mandroux-Colas, on their Wikipedia biographies. Jean-Pierre Grand asked the president of the French National Assembly and the Prime Minister of France to reinforce the legislation on the penal responsibility of Internet sites and of authors who peddle false informations in order to cause harm.^[48] Senator Jean Louis Masson then requested the Minister of Justice to tell him whether it would be possible to increase the criminal responsibilities of hosting providers, site operators, and authors of libelous content; the minister declined to do so, recalling the existing rules in the LCEN law.^[49]

On August 25 2010, the Toronto Star reported that the Canadian "government is now conducting two investigations into federal employees who have taken to Wikipedia to express their opinion on federal policies and bitter political debates."^[50]

Commandeering or Sanitizing Articles

Articles of particular interest to an editor or group of editors are sometimes commandeered^[51] and sanitized^[52][53][54] to continually reflect a point of view that sheds a favorable light on the subject or group. Editors essentially "squat" on pages, watching for negative entries, then immediately revert them. This is especially true of pages on politicians as shown on USA Congressional staff edits to Wikipedia. Sanitized pages range from the Tanaka Memorial being sometimes protected by sympathetic Chinese, to the page on The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, a group that regularly sanitizes "its" page. The page on Scientology has also been subject to being commandeered and put under the Wikipedia:Protection policy. These habits of commandeering, sanitizing and squatting discourage informed experts from spending the time and attention to make well-footnoted entries for fear that accurate and time-consuming work will be quickly deleted.

Editing for financial rewards

In January 2007 Rick Jelliffe claimed in a story carried by CBS^[55] and IDG News Service ^[56][57] that Microsoft had offered him compensation in exchange for his future editorial services on Wikipedia's articles related to OOXML (Office Open Extensible Markup Language). A Microsoft spokesperson, quoted by CBS, commented that "Microsoft and the writer, Rick Jelliffe, had not determined a price and no money had changed hands – but they had agreed that the company would not be allowed to review his writing before submission". Also quoted by CBS, Jimmy Wales expressed his disapproval of Microsoft's involvement: "We were very disappointed to hear that Microsoft was taking that approach".

In a story covered by the BBC, former Novell chief scientist Jeffrey Merkey claimed that in exchange for a donation his Wikipedia entry was edited in his favor. Jay Walsh, a spokesman for Wikipedia, flatly denied the allegations in an interview given to The Daily Telegraph.^[58]

WikiScanner systematically exposes biased editors

In August 2007, a tool called WikiScanner developed by Virgil Griffith, a visiting researcher from the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico, was released to match anonymous IP edits in the encyclopedia with an extensive database of addresses.^[59]

News stories appeared about IP addresses from various organizations such as the Central Intelligence Agency, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, Diebold, Inc. and the Australian government being used to make edits to Wikipedia articles, sometimes of an opinionated or questionable nature. Another story stated that an IP address from the BBC itself had been used to vandalize the article on George W. Bush.^[60]

The BBC quoted a Wikipedia spokesperson as praising the tool: "We really value transparency and the scanner really takes this to another level. Wikipedia Scanner may prevent an organisation or individuals from editing articles that they're really not supposed to."^[61] Not everyone hailed WikiScanner as a success for Wikipedia. Oliver Kamm, in a column for The Times, argued instead that:^[62]

The WikiScanner is thus an important development in bringing down a pernicious influence on our intellectual life. Critics of the web decry the medium as the cult of the amateur. Wikipedia is worse than that; it is the province of the covert lobby. The most constructive course is to stand on the sidelines and jeer at its pretensions.

It's important to note that the WikiScanner only reveals conflicts of interest when the editor does not have a Wikipedia account and their IP address is used instead. Conflict of interest editing done by editors with accounts is not detected, since those edits are anonymous to everyone - except for a handful of privileged Wikipedia admins.^[63]

Conflicts involving policy makers

In February 2008, British technology news and opinion website The Register published an article called "Wikipedia ruled by 'Lord of the Universe'" about a prominent Wikipedia administrator, Jossi Fresco. It reported that Fresco declared a conflict of interest related to Prem Rawat, then made "biased" edits to the Prem Rawat article to minimize criticism, and altered the Wikipedia policies over personal biography and "conflict of interest", to favour them. The article pointed out that Fresco was also involved in Wikipedia's "Conflict of Interest Noticeboard", the situation which the Register article described as "a conflict of conflict of interest". The article ended with the claim:^[64] "Jossi Fresco may bear the most extreme conflict of interest in the history of Wikipedia – and he edits the policy that governs conflict of interest."

Some of the most scathing criticism of Wikipedia's claimed neutrality came in The Register, which in turn was allegedly criticized by founding members of the project. According to The Register:^[65]

In short, Wikipedia is a cult. Or at least, the inner circle is a cult. We aren't the first to make this observation.^[66] On the inside, they reinforce each other's beliefs. And if anyone on the outside questions those beliefs, they circle the wagons. They deny the facts. They attack the attacker. After our Jossi Fresco story, Fresco didn't refute our reporting. He simply accused us of "yellow journalism". After our Overstock.com article, Wales called us "trash".

Quality of the presentation

"Waffling" prose, "antiquarianism" and quality of writing

Roy Rosenzweig, in a June 2006 essay that combined both praise and criticism of Wikipedia, had several criticisms of its prose and its failure to distinguish the genuinely important from the merely sensational. He said that Wikipedia is "surprisingly accurate in reporting names, dates, and events in U.S. history" (Rosenzweig's own field of study) and that most of the few factual errors that he found "were small and inconsequential" and that some of them "simply repeat widely held but inaccurate beliefs", which are also repeated in Encarta and the Britannica. However, he made one major criticism.

Good historical writing requires not just factual accuracy but also a command of the scholarly literature, persuasive analysis and interpretations, and clear and engaging prose. By those measures, American National Biography Online easily outdistances Wikipedia.^[67]

Contrasting Wikipedia's treatment of Abraham Lincoln to that of Civil War historian James McPherson in American National Biography Online, he said that both were essentially accurate and covered the major episodes in Lincoln's life, but praised "McPherson's richer contextualization… his artful use of quotations to capture Lincoln's voice … and … his ability to convey a profound message in a handful of words." By contrast, he gives an example of Wikipedia's prose that he finds "both verbose and dull." Rosenzweig made a further criticism, contrasting "the skill and confident judgment of a seasoned historian" displayed by McPherson and others to the "antiquarianism" of Wikipedia (which he compares in this respect to American Heritage magazine), and said that while Wikipedia often provides extensive references, they are not the best ones.^[67]

Rosenzweig also criticized the "waffling—encouraged by the npov policy—[which] means that it is hard to discern any overall interpretive stance in Wikipedia history." By example, he quoted the conclusion of Wikipedia's article on William Clarke Quantrill. While generally praising the article, he pointed out its "waffling" conclusion: "Some historians…remember him as an opportunistic, bloodthirsty outlaw, while others continue to view him as a daring soldier and local folk hero."^[67]

Other critics have made similar charges that, even if Wikipedia articles are factually accurate, they are often written in a poor, almost unreadable style. Frequent Wikipedia critic Andrew Orlowski commented: "Even when a Wikipedia entry is 100 per cent factually correct, and those facts have been carefully chosen, it all too often reads as if it has been translated from one language to another then into to a third, passing an illiterate translator at each stage."^[68]

In an article in The Times of London Jimmy Wales stood by the quality of the presentation in Wikipedia:^[62]

'I am unaware of any problems with the quality of discourse on the site,' he said. 'I don’t know of any higher-quality discourse anywhere.'

The Wall Street Journal debate

In the September 12, 2006 edition of The Wall Street Journal, Jimmy Wales debated with Dale Hoiberg, editor-in-chief of Encyclopædia Britannica.^[69] Hoiberg focused on a need for expertise and control in an encyclopedia and cited Lewis Mumford that overwhelming information could "bring about a state of intellectual enervation and depletion hardly to be distinguished from massive ignorance."

Wales emphasized Wikipedia's differences, and asserted that openness and transparency lead to quality. Hoiberg claimed that he "had neither the time nor space to respond to [criticisms]" and "could corral any number of links to articles alleging errors in Wikipedia", to which Wales responded: "No problem! Wikipedia to the rescue with a fine article", and included a link to the Wikipedia article Criticism of Wikipedia.^[69]

Systemic bias in coverage

Wikipedia has been accused of systemic bias, which is to say its general nature leads without necessarily any conscious intention to the propagation of various prejudices. Although many articles in newspapers have concentrated on minor, indeed trivial, factual errors in Wikipedia articles, there are also concerns about large scale, presumably unintentional effects from the increasing influence and use of Wikipedia as a research tool at all levels. In an article in the Times Higher Education magazine (London) philosopher Martin Cohen frames Wikipedia of having "become a monopoly" with "all the prejudices and ignorance of its creators", which he describes as a "youthful cab-drivers" perspective.^[70] Cohen's argument, however, finds a grave conclusion in these circumstances: "To control the reference sources that people use is to control the way people comprehend the world. Wikipedia may have a benign, even trivial face, but underneath may lie a more sinister and subtle threat to freedom of thought."^[70] That freedom is undermined by what he sees as what matters on Wikipedia, "not your sources but the 'support of the community'."^[70]

Critics also point to the tendency to cover topics in a detail disproportionate to their importance. For example, Stephen Colbert, in a wikigroan, once mockingly praised Wikipedia for having a "longer entry on 'lightsabers' than it does on the 'printing press'."^[71] In an interview with The Guardian, Dale Hoiberg, the editor-in-chief of Encyclopædia Britannica, noted:^[14]

People write of things they're interested in, and so many subjects don't get covered; and news events get covered in great detail. In the past, the entry on Hurricane Frances was more than five times the length of that on Chinese art, and the entry on Coronation Street was twice as long as the article on Tony Blair.

This critical approach has been satirised "Wikigroaning", a term coined by Jon Hendren^[72] of the website Something Awful.^[73] In the game, two articles (preferably with similar names) are compared: one about an acknowledged serious or classical subject and the other about a topic popular or current.^[74] Defenders of a broad inclusion criteria have held that the encyclopedia's coverage of pop culture does not impose space constraints on the coverage of more serious subjects (see "Wiki is not paper"). As Ivor Tossell noted:

That Wikipedia is chock full of useless arcana (and did you know, by the way, that the article on "Debate" is shorter than the piece that weighs the relative merits of the 1978 and 2003 versions of Battlestar Galactica?) isn't a knock against it: Since it can grow infinitely, the silly articles aren't depriving the serious ones of space.^[75]

Notability of article topics

Wikipedia's notability guidelines, and the application thereof, are the subject of much criticism.^[76] Nicholson Baker considers the notability standards arbitrary and essentially unsolvable:^[76]

There are quires, reams, bales of controversy over what constitutes notability in Wikipedia: nobody will ever sort it out.

Criticizing the "deletionists", Nicholson Baker then writes:^[76]

Still, a lot of good work—verifiable, informative, brain-leapingly strange—is being cast out of this paperless, infinitely expandable accordion folder by people who have a narrow, almost grade-schoolish notion of what sort of curiosity an on-line encyclopedia will be able to satisfy in the years to come. [...] It's harder to improve something that's already written, or to write something altogether new, especially now that so many of the World Book–sanctioned encyclopedic fruits are long plucked. There are some people on Wikipedia now who are just bullies, who take pleasure in wrecking and mocking peoples' work—even to the point of laughing at nonstandard "Engrish." They poke articles full of warnings and citation-needed notes and deletion prods till the topics go away.

Yet another criticism^[77] about the deletionists is this: "The increasing difficulty of making a successful edit; the exclusion of casual users; slower growth – all are hallmarks of the deletionists approach."

Complaining that his own biography was on the verge of deletion for lack of notability, Timothy Noah argued that:^[78]

Wikipedia's notability policy resembles U.S. immigration policy before 9/11: stringent rules, spotty enforcement. To be notable, a Wikipedia topic must be "the subject of multiple, non-trivial published works from sources that are reliable and independent of the subject and of each other." Although I have written or been quoted in such works, I can't say I've ever been the subject of any. And wouldn't you know, some notability cop cruised past my bio and pulled me over. Unless I get notable in a hurry—win the Nobel Peace Prize? Prove I sired Anna Nicole Smith's baby daughter?—a "sysop" (volunteer techie) will wipe my Wikipedia page clean. It's straight out of Philip K. Dick.

In the same article, Noah mentions that the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Stacy Schiff was not considered notable enough for a Wikipedia entry before she wrote an extensive New Yorker article on Wikipedia itself.

Liberal bias

Another criticism is that a politically liberal bias is predominant. According to Jimmy Wales: "The Wikipedia community is very diverse, from liberal to conservative to libertarian and beyond. If averages mattered, and due to the nature of the wiki software (no voting) they almost certainly don’t, I would say that the Wikipedia community is slightly more liberal than the U.S. population on average, because we are global and the international community of English speakers is slightly more liberal than the U.S. population. There are no data or surveys to back that."^[79] Andrew Schlafly created Conservapedia (itself often accused of bias) because of his perception that Wikipedia contained a liberal bias.^[80] Conservapedia's editors have compiled a list of alleged examples of liberal bias in Wikipedia.^[81] In 2007, an article in The Christian Post criticised Wikipedia's coverage of Intelligent design, saying that it was biased and hypocritical.^[82] Lawrence Solomon of the National Review considered the Wikipedia articles on subjects like global warming, intelligent design, and Roe v. Wade all to be slanted in favor of liberal views.^[83] The racialist magazine American Renaissance asserted that Wikipedia has a strong liberal bias in racial topics.^[84]

American bias

Tim Anderson, a senior lecturer in political economy at the University of Sydney, said that Wikipedia administrators display a U.S.-oriented bias in their interaction with editors, and in their determination of sources that are appropriate for use on the site. Anderson was outraged after several of the sources he used in his edits to Hugo Chávez, including Venezuela Analysis and Z Magazine, were disallowed as "unusable". Anderson also described Wikipedia's Neutral point of view policy to ZDNet Australia as "a facade", and that Wikipedia "hides behind a reliance on corporate media editorials".^[85]

Sexual content

Wikipedia has been criticized for allowing graphic sexual content such as images and videos of masturbation and ejaculation as well as photos from hardcore pornographic films found on its articles. Child protection campaigners say graphic sexual content appears on many Wikipedia entries, displayed without any warning or age verification.^[86]

The Wikipedia article Virgin Killer – a 1976 album from German heavy metal band Scorpions – features a picture of the album's original cover, which depicts a naked prepubescent girl. The original release cover caused controversy and was replaced in some countries. In December 2008, access to the Wikipedia article Virgin Killer was blocked for four days by most Internet service providers in the United Kingdom, after it was reported by a member of the public as child pornography.^[87] The Internet Watch Foundation, a nonprofit, nongovernment-affiliated organization, criticized the inclusion of the picture as "distasteful".^[88]

In April 2010, Larry Sanger wrote a letter to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, outlining his concerns that two categories of images on Wikimedia Commons contained child pornography, and were in violation of U.S. federal obscenity law.^[89] Sanger later clarified that the images, which were related to pedophilia and one about lolicon, were not of real children, but said that they constituted "obscene visual representations of the sexual abuse of children", under the PROTECT Act of 2003.^[90] That law bans photographic child pornography and cartoon images and drawings of children that are obscene under American law.^[90] Sanger also expressed concerns about access to the images on Wikipedia in schools.^[91] Wikipedia strongly rejected Sanger's accusation.^[92] Wikimedia Foundation spokesman Jay Walsh said that Wikipedia doesn't have "material we would deem to be illegal. If we did, we would remove it."^[92] Following the complaint by Larry Sanger, Wales deleted sexual images without consulting the community. After some editors who volunteer to maintain the site argued that the decision to delete was done hastily, Wales has voluntarily given up some of the powers he had as part of his co-founder status. He wrote in a message to Wikimedia Foundation mailing list this was "in the interest of encouraging this discussion to be about real philosophical/content issues, rather than be about me and how quickly I acted."^[93]

Exposure to vandals

Vandalism of a Wikipedia article

Wikipedia has a range of tools available to users and administrators in order to fight against vandalism. Supporters of the project argue that the vast majority of vandalism on Wikipedia is reverted within a short time, and a study by Fernanda Viégas of the MIT Media Lab and Martin Wattenberg and Kushal Dave of IBM Research found that most vandal edits were reverted within around five minutes; however they state that "it is essentially impossible to find a crisp definition of vandalism".^[94] While most instances of page blanking or the addition of offensive material are soon reverted, less obvious vandalism has remained for longer periods. For example, a user made several racist edits to Martin Luther King, Jr. Day that were not reverted for nearly four hours.^[95] Columnist Sujay Kumar commented:

While Wikipedia says that most vandal edits are removed within five minutes, some falsities have managed to go unnoticed. An outlandishly fake entry about Larry King's uncontrollable flatulence was posted for a month.^[96]

A 2007 peer-reviewed study^[97] that measured the actual number of page views with "damaged" content, concluded:

42% of damage is repaired almost immediately, i.e., before it can confuse, offend, or mislead anyone. Nonetheless, there are still hundreds of millions of damaged views.

"Death by Wikipedia"

"Death by Wikipedia" is a phenomenon in which a person is erroneously proclaimed dead through vandalism. Articles about the comedian Paul Reiser, British television host Vernon Kay, and the West Virginia Senator Robert Byrd, who died on June 28, 2010, have been vandalized in this way.^{[98][99][100]}

Privacy concerns

Most privacy concerns refer to cases of government or employer data gathering; or to computer or electronic monitoring; or to trading data between organizations.^[101] "The Internet has created conflicts between personal privacy, commercial interests and the interests of society at large" warn James Donnelly and Jenifer Haeckl.^[102] Balancing the rights of all concerned as technology alters the social landscape will not be easy. It "is not yet possible to anticipate the path of the common law or governmental regulation" regarding this problem.^[102]

The concern in the case of Wikipedia is the right of a private citizen to remain private; to remain a "private citizen" rather than a "public figure" in the eyes of the law.^[103] It is somewhat of a battle between the right to be anonymous in cyberspace and the right to be anonymous in real life ("meatspace"). Wikipedia Watch argues that "Wikipedia is a potential menace to anyone who values privacy" and that "a greater degree of accountability in the Wikipedia structure" would be "the very first step toward resolving the privacy problem."^[104] A particular problem occurs in the case of an individual who is relatively unimportant and for whom there exists a Wikipedia page against their wishes.

In 2005 Agence France-Presse quoted Daniel Brandt, the Wikipedia Watch owner, as saying that "the basic problem is that no one, neither the trustees of Wikimedia Foundation, nor the volunteers who are connected with Wikipedia, consider themselves responsible for the content."^[105]

In January 2006, a German court ordered the German Wikipedia shut down within Germany because it stated the full name of Boris Floricic, aka "Tron", a deceased hacker who was formerly with the Chaos Computer Club. More specifically, the court ordered that the URL within the German .de domain (http://www.wikipedia.de/) may no longer redirect to the encyclopedia's servers in Florida at http://de.wikipedia.org although German readers were still able to use the US-based URL directly, and there was virtually no loss of access on their part. The court order arose out of a lawsuit filed by Floricic's parents, demanding that their son's surname be removed from Wikipedia.^[106] On February 9, 2006, the injunction against Wikimedia Deutschland was overturned, with the court rejecting the notion that Tron's right to privacy or that of his parents were being violated.^[107] The plaintiffs appealed to the Berlin state court, but were refused relief in May 2006.

Criticism of the community

The Wikipedia community (people who contribute to Wikipedia) is also subject to various criticisms. Emigh and Herring argue that "a few active users, when acting in concert with established norms within an open editing system, can achieve ultimate control over the content produced within the system, literally erasing diversity, controversy, and inconsistency, and homogenizing contributors' voices."^[108] The community has also been criticized for responding to complaints regarding an article's quality by advising the complainer to fix the article themselves.^[109] Professor James H. Fetzer criticized Wikipedia in that he could not change the article about himself;^[110] to ensure impartiality, Wikipedia has a policy that discourages the editing of biographies by the subjects themselves except in "clear-cut cases", such as reverting vandalism or correcting out-of-date or mistaken facts.^[111]

The community has been described as "cult-like,"^{[112][113][114]} although not always with entirely negative connotations.^[115] A popular joke is that Wikipedia cannot possibly work in theory, but does work in practice.^[116]> A larger social community also helps in maintaining a supportive atmosphere and collective etiquette, such as resolving disputes by appealing to reliable sources and Wikipedia's own policies.^[117]

Wikipedia does not require that its users identify themselves. This anonymity has been criticized, since it does not allow editors to be held accountable for their edits. It also means that multiple people may use one account—or, more often, one person may use multiple accounts, often in an attempt to influence an argument. The latter practice is known as "sock puppetry", which is actively discouraged on Wikipedia.^[118]

Jimmy Wales' role

The community of Wikipedia editors has been criticized for placing an irrational emphasis on Jimmy Wales as a person, with phrases such as "What Would Jimbo Do?". Wales' role in personally determining the content of some articles has also been criticized as contrary to the independent spirit that Wikipedia supposedly has gained.^[119][120]

Selection of editors

Stacy Schiff notes in her New Yorker article about Wikipedia that^[121]

Wikipedia is an online community devoted not to last night's party or to next season's iPod but to a higher good. It is also no more immune to human nature than any other utopian project. Pettiness, idiocy, and vulgarity are regular features of the site. Nothing about high-minded collaboration guarantees accuracy, and open editing invites abuse.

Lack of credential verification and the Essjay controversy

In July 2006 The New Yorker ran a feature about Wikipedia by Stacy Schiff.^[121] The initial version of the article included an interview with a Wikipedia administrator known by the pseudonym Essjay, who was described as a tenured professor of theology.^[122] Essjay's Wikipedia user page^[123] (now removed) made the following claim:

I am a tenured professor of theology at a private university in the eastern United States; I teach both undergraduate and graduate theology. I have been asked repeatedly to reveal the name of the institution, however, I decline to do so; I am unsure of the consequences of such an action, and believe it to be in my best interests to remain anonymous.

Essjay also claimed on his user page that he held four academic degrees: Bachelor of Arts in Religious Studies (B.A.), Master of Arts in Religion (M.A.R.), Doctorate of Philosophy in Theology (Ph.D.), and Doctorate in Canon Law (JCD). Essjay specialized in editing articles about religion on Wikipedia, including subjects such as "the penitential rite, transubstantiation, the papal tiara";^[121] on one occasion he was called in to give some "expert testimony" on the status of Mary in the Roman Catholic Church.^[124] In January 2007, Essjay was hired as a manager with Wikia, a wiki-hosting service founded by Wales and Angela Beesley. In February, Wales appointed Essjay as a member of the Wikipedia Arbitration Committee, a group with powers to issue binding rulings in disputes relating to Wikipedia.^[125]

Larry Sanger, who left Wikipedia and is now editor-in-chief of Citizendium.

In late February 2007 The New Yorker added an editorial note to its article on Wikipedia stating that it had learned that Essjay was Ryan Jordan, a 24-year-old college dropout from Kentucky with no advanced degrees and no teaching experience.^[126] Initially Jimmy Wales commented on the issue of Essjay's identity: "I regard it as a pseudonym and I don’t really have a problem with it." Larry Sanger, co-founder^{[127][128][129]} of Wikipedia, responded to Wales on his Citizendium blog by calling Wales' initial reaction "utterly breathtaking, and ultimately tragic." Sanger said the controversy "reflects directly on the judgment and values of the management of Wikipedia."^[130]

Wales later issued a new statement saying he had not previously understood that "EssJay used his false credentials in content disputes." He added: "I have asked EssJay to resign his positions of trust within the [Wikipedia] community."^[131] Sanger responded the next day: "It seems Jimmy finds nothing wrong, nothing trust-violating, with the act itself of openly and falsely touting many advanced degrees on Wikipedia. But there most obviously is something wrong with it, and it's just as disturbing for Wikipedia's head to fail to see anything wrong with it."^[132]

On March 4, Essjay wrote on his user page that he was leaving Wikipedia, and he also resigned his position with Wikia.^[133] A subsequent article in The Courier-Journal (Louisville) suggested that the new résumé he had posted at his Wikia page was exaggerated.^[134] The March 19, 2007 issue of The New Yorker published a formal apology by Wales to the magazine and Stacy Schiff for Essjay's false statements.^[135]

Discussing the incident, the New York Times noted that the Wikipedia community had responded to the affair with "the fury of the crowd", and observed:

The Essjay episode underlines some of the perils of collaborative efforts like Wikipedia that rely on many contributors acting in good faith, often anonymously and through self-designated user names. But it also shows how the transparency of the Wikipedia process—all editing of entries is marked and saved—allows readers to react to suspected fraud.^[136]

The Essjay incident received extensive media coverage, including a national U.S. television broadcast on ABC's World News with Charles Gibson^[137] and a March 7, 2007 Associated Press story that was picked up by more than 100 media outlets listed in the Google news cache.^[138] The controversy has led to a proposal that users claiming to possess academic qualifications would have to provide evidence before citing them in Wikipedia content disputes.^[139] The proposal was not accepted.^[140]

In 2009, it was revealed that a British Labour councillor had been anonymously editing Wikipedia as 'Sam Blacketer', including many political articles in the UK. He resigned from membership of the Arbitration Committee.^[141]

Anonymity of editors

Wikipedia co-founder^[142] Larry Sanger wrote:^[143]

Widespread anonymity leads to a distinguishable problem, namely, the attractiveness of the project to people who merely want to cause trouble, or who want to undermine the project, or who want to change it into something that it is avowedly not – in other words, the troll problem.

But more importantly, allowing anonymous editing generally induces a lack of authority, accountability, and healthy (or at least civil) interaction:^[144]

... Wikipedia's anonymity reduces the accountability that stimulates healthy exchanges. ... "When you put everybody in a system that is flat, where everybody can say yes or no, without any sense of authority, what you get is tribalism", ... "What has gone into the article creation is very often the result of this dysfunctional system. It presents itself with this aura of authority, whereas what goes on behind the scenes is anything but."

On many occasions, open (anonymous) editing is the source of many problems: Pettiness, idiocy, vulgarity, lack of accuracy, abuse (complete quotation).^[121]

A February 2008 article in SF Weekly details a journalist's futile attempts to track down the real identity of Wikipedia user Griot, who got involved in edit wars over the biography of Ralph Nader as well as local politicians, and was eventually banned on Wikipedia for sock puppeteering. The article draws the distinction between the press and Wikipedia:^[145]

Say what you will about the press: There is at least a measure of accountability in a newspaper that is rarely seen on Wikipedia. It's called a byline. I mean, I'm sure I've produced some less-than-brilliant work during the dozen or so years I've been a journalist. But at least I've had the guts to sign my name — my real name — to what I write.

The article also quotes Paul Grabowicz, the new-media program director for the University of California at Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism:

"I guess I have the same feeling about Wikipedia and other citizen-generated sites [as I have] about the media: The more transparency the better" [...] "People should be able to find out who is producing the information."

In Wikipedia itself the term "anonymous" is used in a much narrower sense than in the citations above. Namely only those editors that do not have a registered account, and use an auto-generated IP-labeled account, are called anonymous or "anons". To disambiguate the two notions on anonymity, in the remainder of this section the term unregistered is used for the narrower Wikipedia meaning.

Unregistered editors reveal their IP addresses, which can be used by admins to register complaints with Internet service providers or to put "range blocks" in place. Admins may also choose not to block because they might exclude regular contributors who share the same IP. Knowledgeable computer users and hackers, though, are easily capable of finding ways around IP blocking. Many have suggested requiring users to register before editing articles, and on December 5, 2005 non-registered editors were prohibited from creating new articles on the English Wikipedia.^[146] This does not address the larger problem of anonymity however.

Editorial process

Level of debate, edit wars, flame wars, and harassment

The standard of debate on Wikipedia has been called into question by persons who have noted that contributors can make a long list of salient points and pull in a wide range of empirical observations to back up their arguments, only to have them ignored completely on the site.^[66] An academic study of Wikipedia articles found that the level of debate among Wikipedia editors on controversial topics often degenerated into counterproductive squabbling:

"For uncontroversial, 'stable' topics self-selection also ensures that members of editorial groups are substantially well-aligned with each other in their interests, backgrounds, and overall understanding of the topics...For controversial topics, on the other hand, self-selection may produce a strongly misaligned editorial group. It can lead to conflicts among the editorial group members, continuous edit wars, and may require the use of formal work coordination and control mechanisms. These may include intervention by administrators who enact dispute review and mediation processes, [or] completely disallow or limit and coordinate the types and sources of edits."^[147]

Another complaint about Wikipedia focuses on the efforts of contributors with idiosyncratic beliefs, who push their point of view in an effort to dominate articles, especially controversial ones.^[148][149] This sometimes results in revert wars and pages being locked down. In response, an Arbitration Committee has been formed on the English Wikipedia that deals with the worst alleged offenders—though a conflict resolution strategy is actively encouraged before going to this extent. Also, to stop the continuous reverting of pages, Jimmy Wales introduced a "three-revert rule",^[150] whereby those users who reverse the effect of others' contributions to one article more than three times in a 24-hour period may be blocked.

Another edit war reported in mainstream press happened soon after the death of Kenneth Lay, the disgraced former CEO of Enron, who died from a heart attack. Several editors to the encyclopedia added content to Lay's Wikipedia biography surmising that the death was in fact a suicide, well in advance of any official determination of cause of death. Such edits were reverted and re-inserted several times; eventually the article reported the cause of death as a heart attack. As of July 2007, there is no evidence to suggest that Lay's death was by other than natural causes. The edit history of the article was investigated by the press, and The Washington Post published a column on the subject.^[151]

Another edit war occurred in August 2009 on Swedish Wikipedia, where Onoff employees removed critical content from the article about Onoff, a Swedish retail chain that sells home electronics and appliances. Erik Frankedal, press contact for Onoff, told Computer Sweden that he didn't know about this edit and didn't have the time to check it out. IDG reported about this event.^[152]

A SF Weekly article^[145] commented on the stakes of edit wars:

Many an edit war may seem like a fight over nothing to the casual observer, but considering that according to its staff, the popular, multilingual Web site gets about 7 billion views per month, stakes can be high. An edit yields what millions of people read on the site on any particular topic.

A common complaint about Wikipedia concerns so-called "flame wars", or deliberate insults made by users to create a hostile environment. The increasingly hostile environment in Wikipedia has led to a sharp and alarming decline in the number of Wikipedia editors, as reported in a recent article in The Wall Street Journal on 27 Nov 2009, titled "Volunteers Log Off as Wikipedia Ages"^[153]

Volunteers have been departing the project that bills itself as "the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit" faster than new ones have been joining, and the net losses have accelerated over the past year. In the first three months of 2009, the English-language Wikipedia suffered a net loss of more than 49,000 editors, compared to a net loss of 4,900 during the same period a year earlier. ... "Wikipedia is becoming a more hostile environment", contends Mr. Ortega, a project manager at Libresoft, a research group at the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos in Madrid. "Many people are getting burnt out when they have to debate about the contents of certain articles again and again."^[153]

This concern has been acknowledged by Wikipedia; civility^[154] and "no personal attacks"^[155] are official policies of the project, and the concept of "wikiquette" has been adopted by some users in response.^[156]

In an article in The Brooklyn Rail, Wikipedia contributor David Shankbone contended that he had been harassed and stalked because of his work on Wikipedia, had received no support from the authorities or the Wikimedia Foundation, and only mixed support from the Wikipedia community. Shankbone wrote that "If you become a target on Wikipedia, do not expect a supportive community."^[157]

Consensus and the "hive mind"

Oliver Kamm, in an article for The Times, expressed skepticism toward Wikipedia's reliance on consensus in forming its content:^[62]

Wikipedia seeks not truth but consensus, and like an interminable political meeting the end result will be dominated by the loudest and most persistent voices.

In his article, Digital Maoism: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism (first published online by Edge: The Third Culture, 30 May 2006), computer scientist and digital theorist Jaron Lanier describes Wikipedia as a "hive mind" that is "for the most part stupid and boring", and asks, rhetorically, "why pay attention to it?" His thesis follows:

The problem is in the way the Wikipedia has come to be regarded and used; how it's been elevated to such importance so quickly. And that is part of the larger pattern of the appeal of a new online collectivism that is nothing less than a resurgence of the idea that the collective is all-wise, that it is desirable to have influence concentrated in a bottleneck that can channel the collective with the most verity and force. This is different from representative democracy, or meritocracy. This idea has had dreadful consequences when thrust upon us from the extreme Right or the extreme Left in various historical periods. The fact that it's now being re-introduced today by prominent technologists and futurists, people who in many cases I know and like, doesn't make it any less dangerous.^[158]

Lanier goes on to point out the economic trend to reward entities that aggregate information, rather than those that actually generate content. In the absence of "new business models", the popular demand for content will be sated by mediocrity, thus reducing or even eliminating any monetary incentives for the production of new knowledge.^[158]

Lanier's opinions produced some strong disagreement. Internet consultant Clay Shirky noted that Wikipedia has many internal controls in place and is not a mere mass of unintelligent collective effort:

Neither proponents nor detractors of hive mind rhetoric have much interesting to say about Wikipedia itself, because both groups ignore the details... Wikipedia is best viewed as an engaged community that uses a large and growing number of regulatory mechanisms to manage a huge set of proposed edits... To take the specific case of Wikipedia, the Seigenthaler/Kennedy debacle catalyzed both soul-searching and new controls to address the problems exposed, and the controls included, inter alia, a greater focus on individual responsibility, the very factor "Digital Maoism" denies is at work.^[159]

In a 2005 study, Emigh and Herring note that there are not yet many formal studies of Wikipedia or its model, and suggest that Wikipedia achieves its results by social means—self-norming, a core of active users watching for problems, and expectations of encyclopedic text drawn from the wider culture.^[108]

Social stratification

An article in Computer Power User asserted that former editors of Wikipedia formed Wikitruth, a site that exposes alleged censorship and infighting on the encyclopedia.^[160] Jimmy Wales dismissed the site as a "hoax" created by editors who had their articles deleted or modified on Wikipedia.^[161]

Since its creation, Wikipedia ostensibly upheld the basic principle of equal status for all good faith editors. As of 2010, Jimbo Wales still claimed in his statement of principles for Wikipedia,

There must be no cabal, no elite, and no hierarchy or structure to get in the way of this openness to newcomers. Any security measures to be implemented to protect the community against real vandals (and there are real vandals, who do occasionally affect us), should be implemented on the model of "strict scrutiny."

Expansion of administrator authority

On the other hand, to reduce vandalism and to control user conduct, Wikipedia created a class of volunteer administrators or "sysops" who are invested with the means and authority to discipline users.^[162] Administrator powers include deleting articles, protecting pages from editing, and blocking users; actions that ordinary (non-sysop) editors cannot do nor undo. Special rules and protocols were set up prevent administrators from abusing their powers; such as the Wikipedia:Articles for deletion (AfD) page, a forum to discuss article deletions. An administrator who wished to delete an article was required to post a notice on the article itself, and wait for comments of other editors, before carrying out the deletion. Moreover, since every sysop can undo the actions of other sysops, any reported abuse by one individual can in principle be corrected by his peers.

Nevertheless, those extra powers inevitably meant that the opinion of administrators, individually and as a whole, would prevail over that of ordinary users in certain kinds of disputes. While the principle of equality among editors was never formally revised, changes in Wikipedia policies have gradually increased the effective authority and independence of administrators. These changes intensified after 2006, when the Seigenthaler biography incident, which forced Wikipedia to tighten its defences against malicious edits. For instance, at some point sysops were given the authority to speedily delete, without prior discussion on the AfD, articles that were clearly malicious, or deemed inappropriate by any of several other criteria. In 2010, these criteria were further widened to include biographies of living persons (BLPs) which did not include adequate references, irrespective of their contents being verifiable or not. As a consequence of these enlarged powers, administrators have increasingly had to impose their opinion, ex officio, over that of ordinary users.^[163] At the same time, the body of Wikipedia rules and procedures kept increasing in size and complexity. This further increased the authority gap between administrators and veteran editors, who know the rules, and ordinary editors — especially novice ones.

Complaints about administrator abuse

Complaints about abuse of power by administrators are frequently made in Wikipedia's internal forums, including the discussion pages associated with specific articles, pages for discussions of rules and procedures, the message boards of individual users, as well as general bulletin boards. Many of those complaints appear to be due to ignorance or misunderstanding of Wikipedia's rules. Only a small fraction of those allegations have been formally submitted to Wikipedia's disciplinary committees. Allegations have also been made in those internal forums that administrator abuse has been steadily increasing in frequency and severity, and that it is one major reason for decline in editor numbers since 2006--a striking reversal from its exponential growth from 2001 to 2005.^[164]

In the context of these complaints, the term "administrator" is often used to also encompass editors who are not formally administrators, but who engage in administrative activities like tagging and categorizing articles, running robots, writing and enforcing rules, and proposing user bans and article deletions, or who are mistaken by other editors as administrators on the basis of their previous actions or arguments.

Allegations of administrator abuse have recently started to circulate outside Wikipedia in blogs, online technical forums, and in mainstream media. "Some disillusioned former Wikipedians gripe about such bureaucratic heavy-handedness and/or the rabidity of some of the site's devotees, grumbling about 'Swastikipedia.'"^[165] It has also been noted that, despite the perception of Wikipedia as a "shining example of Web democracy" that "a small number of people are running the show."^[166] Despite the need for some form of control in an open system, this "doesn't explain the kind of territorialism—the authorial domination by 1 percent of contributors—on the site's pages."^[166] In an article on Wikipedia conflicts, The Guardian noted complaints that administrators sometimes use their special powers to suppress legitimate editors.^[167] The article discussed "a backlash among some editors, who argue that blocking users compromises the supposedly open nature of the project, and the imbalance of power between users and administrators may even be a reason some users choose to vandalise in the first place."^[167]

'My vandalism started after an edit conflict over the Courier-Journal's sports and editorial coverage, where my – what I felt were – legitimate edits on the page for C-J criticism were removed and I was blasted,' he says. 'I have being vandalising Wikipedia and its user pages for months, mostly because seeing my vandalism or that of others was funny as hell... and to punish admins.

Perception of administrators as a closed community

An ordinary editor can ask to become an administrator by submitting a request for adminship (RfA). The editor's record and qualifications are is discussed by other editors for a week, and the promotion is then decided by one of Wikipedia's bureaucrats — a set of about 25 sysops at the top level of Wikipedia's administration. The criteria that bureaucrats are supposed to look for include knowledge and respect for Wikipedia's rules, steady and varied editing activity, etc.^[168][169]

Among the allegations of administrator abuse, one often finds claims that the administrators have become a clique whose goals or viewpoints set them apart from ordinary users. An article on The Register, dated 4 December 2007 and entitled "Secret mailing list rocks Wikipedia", alleged the use of a private mailing list to coordinate administrative actions.^[170] A follow-up article on 8 December 2007 specifically alleged that administrators were collaborating with critics of Overstock.com to "own" articles about the company.^[171]

Consistency of complaints

The existence and significance of widespread administrator abuse is highy disputed within Wikipedia. A common rebuttal to such allegations is that a raising of editorial standards became necessary to improve the quality of Wikipedia articles. In particular, the higher rates of article deletions observed since 2006^[164] are claimed to be necessary to meet new guidelines on allowed article topics, such as a set of "notability" requirements. The same argument is used to justify the insertion of tags in articles that warn readers against perceived flaws and/or request that other editors perform certain editorial actions.

There have been no systematic surveys of the opinions of ordinary editors about sysop behavior, or about Wikipedia governance in general. A limited enquiry was made in 2009 among former Wikipedia editors, with the goal of finding out the reasons why they had left. Another experiment was conducted in 2009, with the goal of determining whether Wikipedia had indeed become hostile to new editors. In this experiment, several experienced editors pretended to be inexperienced new users, deliberately created poor-quality articles, and followed their fate over the following weeks.

Pareto effect

Known phenomena such as the Pareto principle and the 1% rule affect the Wikipedia community. Wikipedia's own statistics show that only a small number of users account for a large number of the edits made.^[172] The alleged results of this is that Wikipedia, as viewed, is not truly a global community work but rather the work of an anonymous minority whose material is overrepresented. (Note that this is different from the complaints regarding administrators because the users in question are not required to be administrators, just to edit a lot.) In January 2009, Jimmy Wales himself observed that the majority of Wikipedia edits are made by a group of around 500 people who "all know each other".^[173] (By contrast, the Encyclopædia Britannica, in spite of having a policy of vetting authors as experts in their field, has 4100 contributing authors.) However, when amount of text was used as a metric instead of edit count in several randomly-selected articles, many of the major contributors had not even registered.^[173]

Plagiarism concerns

The Wikipedia Watch criticism website in 2006 has listed dozens of examples of plagiarism by Wikipedia editors on the English version.^[174] Jimmy Wales, the Wikipedia co-founder ^[142], has said in this respect: "We need to deal with such activities with absolute harshness, no mercy, because this kind of plagiarism is 100% at odds with all of our core principles."^[174]

Impact on society

Some observers claim that Wikipedia is undesirable, because it is an economic threat to publishers of traditional encyclopedias, many of whom may be unable to compete with a product that is essentially free. Nicholas Carr writes in the essay "The amorality of Web 2.0", speaking of the so-called Web 2.0 as a whole: "Implicit in the ecstatic visions of Web 2.0 is the hegemony of the amateur. I for one can't imagine anything more frightening."^[175] Others dispute the notion that Wikipedia, or similar efforts, will entirely displace traditional publications. For instance, Chris Anderson, the editor-in-chief of Wired Magazine, wrote in Nature that the "wisdom of the crowds" approach of Wikipedia will not displace top scientific journals with their rigorous peer review process.^[176]

Satire of Wikipedia

The Onion newspaper headline "Wikipedia Celebrates 750 Years Of American Independence"

Wikipedia has been satirized by humorists who call attention to factual inaccuracies that may appear in articles owing to sloppy or biased editors or vandalism. For example, an article in The Onion was entitled "Wikipedia Celebrates 750 Years Of American Independence"^[177] In a piece on The Colbert Report, entitled "Wikiality" (a portmanteau of "wiki" and "reality"), Stephen Colbert encouraged his viewers to change Wikipedia's article on elephants to state that the number of African elephants had tripled over the past six months.^[178] Colbert's comments provoked a wave of vandalism of various articles at Wikipedia.^[179] On the January 29, 2007 edition of his program, Colbert did another segment on an attempt by Microsoft^[55][56][57] to hire writers to skew certain Wikipedia articles in their favor, ending with a call by Colbert to change the Wikipedia article on "truth" to the phrase "Truth has become a commodity" and offering a $5 cash reward to the first viewer to do so.

In the American Dad! episode "Black Mystery Month" the character Steve Smith, seeking the "one place where a person can put out crazy information with no evidence that millions will accept as true," turns to Wikipedia.^[180] Mad Magazine has spoofed Wikipedia several times in a section of "short takes" on topics of current interest.

An article in The Sun derided Wikipedia for including a "List of big-bust models and performers". Quoting an unnamed "company source", the article concluded: "It's every computer geek's dream come true – definitely one of Wikipedia's breast, I mean best, assets".^[181]

In a GamesRadar editorial, columnist Charlie Barrat juxtaposed Wikipedia's coverage of video game-related topics with topics that have greater real-world significance, such as God, World War II and former U.S. presidents. The voluminous material that in many cases exists regarding the former when compared with the latter is the subject of his criticism and satire.^[182]

Satire also exists in the form of parody encyclopedias such as Encyclopedia Dramatica^[183] and Uncyclopedia.^[184]

See also

• Deletionism and inclusionism in Wikipedia
• History of Wikipedia
• Reliability of Wikipedia
• User-generated content
• Wikipedia:Press coverage
• Wikipedia:Why Wikipedia is not so great
• Wikipedia:Criticisms
• Wikipedia:Replies to common objections
• Wikipedia Review and Wikitruth, two web sites about Wikipedia frequently critical of it and its leadership.

Further reading

• Andrew Keen. The Cult of the Amateur. Doubleday/Currency, 2007. ISBN 978-0-385-52080-5 (substantial criticisms of Wikipedia and other web 2.0 projects). Listen to:^[185] the NPR interview with A. Keen, Weekend Edition Saturday, June 16, 2007.
• Sheizaf Rafaeli & Yaron Ariel (2008). Online motivational factors: Incentives for participation and contribution in Wikipedia. In A. Barak (Ed.), Psychological aspects of cyberspace: Theory, research, applications (pp. 243–267). Cambridge, UK:Cambridge University Press.^[186]

References