How Wikipedia is ruining everything

June 9th, 2010 - File under Blog - 208118 Comments;http%3A%2F%2Fwww.filibustercartoons.com%2Findex.php%2F2010%2F06%2F09%2Fhow-wikipedia-is-ruining-everything%2FHow+Wikipedia+is+ruining+everything2010-06-09+18%3A53%3A44J.J.http%3A%2F%2Fwww.filibustercartoons.com%2F%3Fp%3D2081

Longtime readers of this site will know that I like to prattle on and on about various things. I’ve written a number of essays, made a lot of charts, even authored a thorough guide to my country. When I’m gathering facts for this kind of stuff, I make it a conscious point to never consult Wikipedia.

I really don’t like Wikipedia. I don’t care for its awkward and ugly layout, I don’t trust it’s information, and I don’t have high regard for the people who run it. These are not uncommon criticisms, and the Internet is full of sites entirely devoted to documenting Wikipedia’s numerous sins, especially in regards to the reliability of its articles and the sanity of its ruling clique. Wiki-bashing, in short, has been around as long as the site itself.

Yet even so, to take a stand against Wikipedia still puts you on fairly defensive ground. Particularly among those of us who enjoy learning for its own sake, accumulating trivia and fun facts as a path to personal betterment, Wikipedia has become something of a beloved plaything. How wonderful it is to have so much information consolidated within a single site! How fun it is to spend the evening hopping from link to link to link, reading dozens of pages on such a crazy diversity of topics! Sure, we can raise some mild criticisms here and there, but overall, the site is far more helpful than harmful.

The very people who, in ordinary circumstances should be most critical of Wikipedia (and in an earlier era, probably were) have become its most outspoken apologists, moist-eyed at its bottomless content and ease of use. It’s these people who I want to direct my Wiki-criticisms to. If you truly value the idea of the Internet as overflowing cornucopia of diverse human knowledge, then it must be acknowledged that Wikipedia represents the most serious threat to both the quality and quantity of factual information available on the web today. If present trends continue, Wikipedia’s hegemony will only further depress our already collectively low standards of what constitutes a well-informed or well-read individual. And when such intellectual standards suffer, so too does everything else: the media, our popular culture, our political discourse, the education system… The unchecked spread of crappy information is a serious cause for alarm on many, many fronts.

So how is Wikipedia ruining everything? Let us count the ways:

1) Wikipedia is everyone’s first stop for information

Despite its enormous success, Wikipedia still has a lingering image problem. There remains an inescapable tinge of shame associated with using the site, and if pressed, most readers will usually concede that yeah, it’s probably not the the world’s most reputable or accurate reservoir of information. Instinctively, the site fails what a favorite Internet pundit of mine once dubbed the “five second test:” if something sounds like an unworkable, crackpot idea upon your first five seconds of hearing it, it probably is. “An encyclopedia anyone can edit” is the sort of brazenly awful proposal the human brain is programed to violently reject, and all the rigorous editing policies on earth will never completely assure your conscience otherwise.

So instead, in one of the most fashionable one-liners of our age, everyone claims to visit Wikipedia “just for a quick introduction,” or to browse “the general idea” of a complex topic. It’s fast becoming the “I just read Playboy for the articles” of the 21st Century.

The problem is, first impressions matter. A lot. And all the flaws of Wikipedia — the biases, the sloppiness, the hidden agendas, the omissions, the lies, the lackluster references — are just as corrupting whether you consult the site for five minutes or five hours. Indeed, spending less time on Wikipedia may actually be worse than more, and consulting a page for an introduction to a topic of which you know nothing may ultimately be more harmful than reading about a subject of which you already possess considerable knowledge. If your brain is devoid of information and you’re desperate to fill it, the first sites you consult will obviously play an enormous role in forging your lasting understanding. First impressions are the prism through which all subsequent knowledge is filtered and processed, so it’s vital to get a good one.

Here’s an example. If I was asked to author a brief introduction for an article on “the Government of Canada,” to be read by someone completely ignorant of the matter, I might write:

The Government of Canada is the central political authority of the nation of Canada, structured as a parliamentary democracy and constitutional monarchy. Canada’s founding document, the Constitution Act, 1867, establishes Canada as a federal state, and as such the powers of the Canadian Government are formally distinct from those of the country’s 10 provincial governments and three territorial governments, which are separately construed and hold exclusive sovereignty in particular matters of local importance. The main institutions of the Government of Canada are the House of Commons, Senate, Prime Minister, Cabinet, Governor-General, and Supreme Court.

Good enough. Covers most of the bases. Now compare what I wrote with the complete introduction of Wikipedia’s Government of Canada article:

The government of Canada, formally called Her Majesty’s Government, is the system whereby the federation of Canada is administered by a common authority; in Canadian English, the term can mean either the collective set of institutions or specifically the Queen-in-Council. In both senses, the construct was established at Confederation, through the Constitution Act, 1867, as a constitutional monarchy, wherein the Canadian Crown acts as the core, or “the most basic building block,” of the kingdom’s Westminster-style parliamentary democracy. The Crown is thus the foundation of the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of the Canadian government. Further elements of governance are outlined in the rest of the constitution of Canada, which includes written statutes, court rulings, and unwritten conventions developed over centuries

That’s a total of six separate explicit references to Canada as a monarchical country, which, in actuality, is probably one of the most incidental attributes of the Canadian government. Such over-emphasis is a product of the royalist bias that has infected most of Wikipedia’s Canada-related articles, which is in turn a product of unrepresentative dominance of pro-monarchy editors on the site.

As a functional matter, it is extraordinarily debatable as to whether the “Canadian Crown acts as the core… of the kingdom’s Westminster-style parliamentary democracy,” unless one is using a very abstract understanding of what the Crown represents. As a linguistic matter, no Canadian ever uses terms like “Her Majesty’s Government,” “Canadian Crown,” or “kingdom” in reference to their country. Yet if you’re some foreigner who knows nothing about Canada, what will your first impression be upon reading such stuff? “Gee, Canada sure is monarchical!” Not the first impression you’d get from any mainstream Canadian textbook or encyclopedia, but exactly the first impression a member of Canada’s weird monarchist subculture would want to impart.

I choose this example not to ride my own personal anti-monarchy hobbyhorse, but rather to illustrate how so much of what you read on Wikipedia is a product of esoteric feuds to control the first impressions of the ignorant. It’s all well and good to steer clear of pages you know will be the product of ongoing edit wars, like, say the entry on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but much harder to avoid being a victim of manipulative writing on a subject whose controversies you are blissfully unaware of.

Matthew White, who used to run an excellent anti-Wikipedia blog, give a few other examples:

As a Southerner, I quickly noticed a pro-Confederate bias in some articles. Right-wing bias showed up in the treatment of the Roosevelts and Social Security. Wikipedia’s List of Massacres was dominated by anti-Americans, Poles and Neo-Nazis when I reviewed it, while their article on Genghis Khan was mostly fawning praise by Mongolian nationalists. The Russian Orthodox Church’s party line is the only point of view allowed on Paul I of Russia’s madness.

Pushy biases are not the only problem, of course. Consulting Wikipedia as an introductory source means you’re equally at risk of walking away with a horribly inaccurate or grossly insufficient first impression simply due to Wikipedia’s infamously lazy research, screwed-up prioritizing, and sub-par writing, a topic I wrote a whole other long essay about.

Maybe if people actually did use Wikipedia as merely one source amongst many, as everyone constantly claims to, the problem might not be so dire. But the fact remains, as we shall see, that Wikipedia is in fact actively crowding out all other sources of information on the net, and quietly setting up its own little totalitarian knowledge dictatorship from which there is no escape. So Wikipedia’s flawed first impressions are transitioning into flawed sole impressions, and we’re all dumber for it.

2) Everyone links to Wikipedia

Even if you wanted to — and most people clearly do not — it’s very difficult to avoid Wikipedia in the year 2010. Today pretty much every site of semi-respectability links to Wikipedia in some form, and feels little shame in doing so. Once regarded as a dubious and uncertain compatriot, the elites of the Internet are now deliberately steering more and more traffic to Wikipedia, and Wikipedia grows in power and prestige as a result.

Most search engines are now rigged to automatically spit out Wikipedia pages as the top matches to any inquiry (not that the site wasn’t already well on its way to achieving this status legitimately). Downloadable browser search bars always provide Wikipedia as a default option. Apple’s built-in Dictionary ap includes an automatic Wikipedia search. Wikipedia is the second site immediately searchable on the Amazon Kindle, after the Amazon.com store. In February Google gave Wikipedia two million dollars to help prop it up, and Yahoo! has similarly made significant donations of computer hardware to the site’s parent company. Microsoft shut down Encarta rather than compete.

And those are just the biggies. Pretty much any news site, blog, forum, podcast, or social network will openly cite, cross-link, and quote Wikipedia on a near constant basis, and many are even merging Borg-like with the site altogether, through subsidiary Wikis of their own, or various auto-link scripts and search aps.

All paths lead to Wikipedia, no matter where you go, which leads to disturbing trend number three:

3) Wikipedia crowds out all other information sites and discourages the emergence of new ones

The main reason why I never believe all those people who claim to “only” read Wikipedia for introductory information before moving on to “more serious sites” for further research is because very few “more serious sites” exist anymore.

A good way to test this is to look at the citations sections of Wiki articles. Do they actually lead anywhere useful?

Stephen Harper’s Wikipedia biography contains an impressive 145 footnotes. Yet of these, the vast majority are newspaper articles, cited mostly to confirm the date a certain policy was implemented, or to prove some political wag really did call the PM this or that name.

The only other biographical web pages referenced — the sort of pages one presumes a Wiki reader would want to visit to continue his research of the man — is a tiny summary of his life by the CBC, his official biographies on the hardly neutral Conservative Party and Government of Canada webpages, and these two sad little websites. And sad as they are, that’s probably about as much non-Wiki information as you’re going to find on the net about a foreign leader these days.

It’s not a surprising state of affairs. Think of it this way. If you’re a young up-and-comer wanting to contribute something to the Internet milieu, what’s it going to be? Are you going to write in-depth, fact-based, encyclopedia-style articles about history, science, geography, politics, art, and biography, and fantasize that your work will someday eclipse Wikipedia, one of the world’s most popular sites, celebrated in the media, and backed by some of the world’s most powerful corporations?

Or are you just going to upload some YouTube videos about cute turtles?

Wikipedia’s smothering dominance of information on the net has heavily disincentivized any efforts to create alternate reference websites. The site’s populist rhetoric gives its success a sort of democratic veneer of legitimacy. Clearly some sort of market has spoken.

As someone who likes making reference articles, I personally find this discouraging and intimidating, but it has to be remembered that I’m a weirdo, and most people don’t regard Wikipedia as a bad thing in the first place. If you think it’s great and love using it, then you’ll obviously be even less likely to contemplate competing with it, or trying to steer its readers away. On the contrary, you’ll probably want to link and integrate with it as much as possible, as we saw above.

Wikipedia is famously “open,” of course, and the argument could be made that a one-party dominance of the Internet’s information reservoir isn’t necessarily so bad as long as there are a multitude of diverse voices working within the system. If the creative energy that used to be devoted to writing independent information pages was being rerouted to produce Wikipedia entries, then there’d still be some hope. But there’s very little evidence that’s happening. Just the opposite, in fact. Wikipedia is edited by fewer and fewer people just as the site gains more and more influence. And the opposition has either converted or surrendered.

4) Wikipedia makes all online information suspect, or at least less prestigious

As Mr. White’s previously-mentioned blog once quipped, Wikipedia is like the Wal-Mart of the Internet. Both drive their competitors out of business by offering junk that’s quick and easy to obtain in mass quantities, even if the overall quality is not great. The only downside is that eventually you wind up with a house full of crap, and that’s basically what the Internet has become under Wikipedia’s benighted rule.

Other than online news stories generated from mainstream media outlets (who still possess paid reporters and research assistants), one pretty much has to traverse the modern Internet assuming that just about every substantial fact you come across originates from Wikipedia. Certainly any fact that explicitly recognizes itself as “fun,” “interesting,” or “little-known” will have been pulled from there, since gathering trivia from Wikipedia has evolved into one of the favorite leisure passtimes of the modern age.

The end result is a massive amount of websites that present themselves as independent, but are really little more than Wikipedia aggregators. And since Wiki information is already suspect on a number of fronts, this means that more and more websites now require being read with the exact same skeptical, cynical eye one used to reserve exclusively for the ‘pedia itself.

Here’s a page, for instance, discussing “6 Bizarre Mysteries (that are still totally unanswered)”. It’s on WeirdWorm.com, one of those sites that specialize in compiling list-based articles of interesting information, much like Cracked or Odee or countless others. The 6 Bizarre Mysteries are indeed mysterious, but they’re also obscure, and presumably considerable research had to be done to compile all the relevant anecdotes. But was the Weird Worm author actually the one doing the research? It seems unlikely, since every single fact he lists can also be found on the mysteries’ respective Wikipedia pages.

This is the chicken-egg dilemma Wikipedia presents for the modern consumption of information on the net. Which came first? Do Wikipedia editors steal from legitimate fact sites, or do fact sites just regurgitate their information from Wikipedia pages?

In most cases the answer is depressingly clear, but not always. So here’s a proposal. All you writers, pundits, and reporters who want to stand out from the crowd of Wiki clones, and want your legitimate research, commentary, and conclusions acknowledged for the independently-gathered, praiseworthy labor that they are, I implore you: put an image like the one on the right somewhere on your website. It’s an easy way to let readers know that the content that they are enjoying is not mere Wikipedia backwash, but rather the product of the long-forgotten art of independent study and investigation.

***

Wikipedia’s imminent demise has been predicted for years, and for years critics have been forced to eat their words. The site has proven itself to be remarkably talented at lurching along, shrugging off the massive paradoxical dilemmas of its existence, and earning ever-greater praise and acclaim for its survival.

What critics of the site have to learn is that logic alone will not drive Wikipedia out of existence. Endlessly rehashing the same old critiques of Wikipedia’s editorial cliquishness, tyrannical management structure, and shameful inability to fulfill its own grandiose goals and standards is not threatening to the site in any meaningful way, since the site is now big enough to transcend petty concerns like “purpose” or “quality.”

Wikipedia is a product, and ultimately its influence will only decline when superior alternates are created, difficult though that may be in the present climate. And since so many of Wikipedia’s flaws stem from its ridiculously over-ambitious nature, successful Wiki-alternatives will mostly likely be small, independently-run reference-style websites and articles that are modest in scale, but high in quality.

Many such sites already exist, and doubtless many more want to exist, but without aggressive support and patronage they’re fighting a loser’s battle. It’s for precisely this reason I believe anyone who passionately enjoys the pursuit of knowledge and scholarly research as positive ends unto themselves should feel more shame and guilt in reading and citing Wikipedia, since it’s probably the single greatest threat to legitimate scholarship on the planet today.

Wikipedia has severely corrupted the culture of online learning. It will take cultural change to reverse it.