Wikipedia, good or bad?
I use Wikipedia almost everyday to look up obscure references from conversations or things I read here and there. Wikipedia must be one of the heaviest traffic websites on the internet. I love the idea of the read/write internet and the democratic notion of letting everybody edit entries on wikipedia. I think that the wiki paradigm itself is great and I’ve established a personal wiki to organize my thoughts at work using TiddlyWiki. I’ve never edited or composed an article on Wikipedia, but have read thousands of them. To my knowledge the information I get from Wikipedia is accurate.
Lately I’ve been very concerned about Wikipedia. Links have been surfacing to very inaccurate articles on Wikipedia. The news broke today that former MTV jock Adam Curry, self proclaimed “father of the podcast” has been anonymously editing the podcast article on Wikipedia to make it look like he is the sole founder of the podcast. Wikipedia traced the IP address that was used to remove information about Kevin Marks who implemented a mechanism for importing RSS feeds into iTunes and load the feed onto an iPod. In addition to wondering how insignificant Curry’s role was in the creation of the podcast, I’m perplexed about how Curry could so freely and anonymously modify the Wikipedia entry.
I realize that inaccurate information can appear on Wikipedia because it has been published without being reviewed and that corrections are constantly being made. What I wonder about is how bias the articles on Wikipedia are. The people publishing the articles are the ones who are most passionate about the subject. For instance, I would bet that Adam Curry has edited his personal article on Wikipedia. I’m sure that gross inaccuracies are eventually eliminated, but it is pretty easy to use words to spin the truth in favor of one’s personal agenda. I will continue to use Wikipedia because I believe that 99.99% of its article are accurate, but I would love to see Wikipedia implement a more stringent review process for articles.
