Wikipedia’s been much in the news recently (if, by “news”, one means the gossip of the blogosphere; and right now, it seems to me, that’s the best news we have). Adam Curry was busted when he attempted to edit Wikipedia’s article on podcasting to pump his own contributions and eliminate or downgrade the contributions of others (particularly Dave Winer). And Dave, in today’s Scripting News, points to an article by Rex Hammond which cautions against unquestioned acceptance of Wikipedia’s authority, calling our attention to a situation in which the Wikipedia bio of John Seigenthaler Sr., courageous editor and publisher emeritus of the Nashville Tennessean, had been changed by an anonymous ill-wisher to implicate Seigenthaler in Robert Kennedy’s assassination. Rex cautions us, “You’re crazy if you take what you read in Wikipedia at face value.” And, of course, he’s right. And he’s also right when he goes on to say that we shouldn’t take any source at face value.
But I think he’s not quite so right when he says, further on, that we should be especially wary of “personal [media] like blogging … or a collaborative one like Wikipedia”. I think, on the contrary, that we should be on our most watchful guard with the impersonal and corporate media: The New York Times, Encyclopaedia Britannica, NPR. It’s not simply that the bias of the articles in those media are just as carefully concealed as those of the articles in Wikipedia (although they are). And it’s not just that those media speak with a weight of authority that Wikipedia lacks (although they do). It’s that the biases in traditional media are less subject to correction by those who do not share them. If a newspaper is caught in a particular egregious misstatement, it may publish a correction, days or weeks later, in small type on an inside page. NPR might broadcast a one-sentence apology at the end of a newscast on a single day. Any outrageous bias in a printed reference book must wait for the next edition to be corrected, if it ever is. Wikipedia, on the other hand, is on the case in hours or days; the podcasting article was rolled back to its prior state and locked for further editing before the first articles on the Curry case surfaced in the corporate media; the Seigenthaler article has also been corrected, and the story of the article’s pirating has been incorporated into the article itself. That’s a level of responsibility (in every sense of the word) that traditional media simply cannot rise to, even if they were to try (although I wish they would).
Wikipedia is an amazing resource—one whose nature I could never have predicted prior to its emergence. I find it invaluable as a source of basic background about people, events, places, ideas and things that I’ve not heard about before or about which my (book learned) knowledge is fuzzy. The more widely I range through the World Wide Web, the more such things I encounter, and I’m grateful to Wikipedia for being always at hand, and so close at hand. But I don’t believe everything I read there, either.
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