Yesterday’s Journal featured a front-page piece about Encyclopedia Britannica’s counteroffensive against Wikipedia, which apparently will kick in full force next week with big newspaper ads defending the old institution’s honor.
I’m not hugely interested in the Britannica argument about the methodology of a study published in Nature magazine that suggested the cooperatively produced, volunteer online Wikipedia had only a slightly higher error rate than the professional, costly encyclopedia. Defining “error” is a hopeless exercise in this field, and invites infinite angels-on-pinhead arguments.
The point isn’t that anyone would claim Wikipedia’s superiority today: Wikipedia leader Jimmie Wales admits in the piece that he was glad Nature focused on science articles, because Wikipedia is a lot weaker in the humanities and social sciences.
The point is that Wikipedia is just over five years old and, by opening itself to contributions and emendations from anyone anywhere, it has already arrived at a position where comparisons with Britannica don’t produce a laugh-off-the-stage reaction. The story here is about process, not snapshots in time. Wikipedia is on an improvement curve that, if it holds up, Britannica will never be able to match.
The big challenge for Wikipedia now is what the management gurus call “process improvement.” The Wikipedians need to keep figuring out ways to inoculate their work from trolls and defacers. We all need to grapple with the ethics and procedures of correcting information that we’re personally involved in (for instance, I once fixed a small factual error on the spotty Wikipedia page for Salon, then my journalism superego kicked in, and I thought, wait a minute, I shouldn’t be doing this, should I?). New crises and problems will keep arising for Wikipedia, like the Seigenthaler brouhaha last year.
No one argues that Wikipedia is perfect, and I don’t doubt that, for the moment, in the majority of areas, Britannica is more reliable. On the other hand, Wikipedia is free. And it keeps getting better. And it’s only a handful of years old. If I worked for Britannica, I think I’d be worried. But I wouldn’t waste my money on newspaper ads; instead, I’d be investing in research to figure out how a centuries-old institution should adapt to a new information-rich age.
BONUS LINK: My Salon colleague Farhad Manjoo has started a blog recording the odd bits of information he has gleaned from the Wikipedia trove.
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