The Inherent Flaw of Wikipedia
Let me give a little background about Wikipedia before I launch into, essentially, an extended metaphor comparing the website to a system following the rules of chemistry and thermodynamics.
A few weeks ago, John Seigenthaler, Sr., a respected journalist (and partial founder of The Tennessean newspaper, which I used to read as I’m originally from Tennessee), found a biographical page on Wikipedia dedicated to him. One of the points argued was that Mr. Seigenthaler might have been responsible for the assassination of Robert Kennedy (whom Sirhan Sirhan assassinated in ’69). This made Mr. Seigenthaler upset, not just for the implication that he was a primary mover in a tinfoil-hat conspiracy, but also because he had been a very close friend of Mr. Kennedy, and, in fact, one of his pallbearers. He challenged the open-source “encyclopedia” publicly, denouncing its self-positioning as a reference tool, and argued for contributors’ accountability.
Depending on your particular information resource on the Internet, this was met with a number of responses. From staunch Wikipedia contributors or supporters, there was a blame the victim approach—“If Mr. Seigenthaler wanted his entry to be accurate, he should have maintained the page himself.” From the mainstream public, there was one of confusion—“What’s a ‘Wikipedia’?” From the Wikipedia founder, Jimmy Wales, there was one of grudging but essentially unhelpful response—“We no longer allow anonymous individuals to create new pages. They can still edit them anonymously, though.” And from the mass of glib nerd-elitists at Slashdot, there was mostly one of smug superiority—“Well, of course Wikipedia’s inaccurate. Why wasn’t Seigenthaler using a real reference?”
Then, in the week of 12 December 2005, we learn that the man who changed Mr. Seiganthaler’s entry did so as a joke. He claimed ignorance of Wikipedia’s solemnity, and denied that he knew anyone would ever use the site as a serious reference tool. Wikipedia is now changing their user policy to mitigate the PR damage done by this debacle.
I started doing some thinking.
Why is it that Wikipedia’s current content model is inadequate? Can the hacks who rely on aphorisms and stupid sayings be correct? I declare that the nature of Wikipedia is dynamic equilibrium, and it is in this mode that the open-source “encyclopedia” presents a startling opportunity as well as a staggering miscalculation.
Dynamic equilibrium is a term used in the physical sciences to describe a system in motion, so long as that motion produces no net change in the contents of the system. For example, aqueous ammonia. If you place ammonia in water, there is a constant reaction occurring (powered simply by the energy of the molecules themselves) that converts ammonia (NH4) to (H30 + NH3). As just mentioned, the reaction is not particularly energetic, and so the energy of collision is enough to create the H30 + NH3, and the unstable nature of H30 allows for decay into H20 and H+ (and because of the nature of negatively-charged NH3, the positively-charged free hydrogen ion is immediately snapped up). We are then left with NH4 and H20 again. So the cycle repeats.
This is useful for us because we are using the entirety of the aqueous ammonia solution to perform our purposes—that is, we are utilizing the ammonia on the macro level instead of on the molecular level. Thus, a dynamic equilibrium of solution is perfectly capable of meeting our needs.
With Wikipedia, there is a similar regard toward dynamic equilibrium, given an article’s popularity and an invested user base. If there are enough people who care about an article, and who have it tracked in the software, then when someone vandalizes or makes an article unintentionally inaccurate, then it will be corrected. Given a long enough timeframe, the article will be a finely-honed resource of accurate information protected from further defacement.
The only problem is that no single human being on the face of the earth interacts with anything on the Internet at the macro level. It’s simply not useful. Instead, all our interactions with Wikipedia are granular, molecular, transactional. Thus we reap no benefit from the dynamic equilibrium model of content protection, because we are not involved in the process over a long timeframe. Instead, we need reliable results at any random moment for any given transaction. Dynamic equilibrium simply cannot do this, because the particles involved still behave randomly (and to remove random behavior is to kill the dynamism). When you access a page, you are essentially taking a shot in the dark as to whether or not those materials are accurate. You cannot guarantee, and neither can Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, what state that page will be in. To return to chemistry, it is like attempting to track any single NH4 molecule through solution and expecting it to remain NH4 at every point along the way.
This is the problem with Wikipedia. Its accuracy can only be guaranteed in the eventuality of several transaction cycles. And since any single page view is the product of only one transaction, this means that unless the open-source website makes radical revisions to its content model, it should simply stop calling itself an “encyclopedia.”
What’s the big deal? you may ask. Why should we be concerned about its content model or its name? Isn’t it just a website? Besides, they put up disclaimers about accuracy and reliability.
That is exactly my point. The problem is, you can’t have it both ways. Either Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, with all the requirements and strictures about accuracy and liability, or it’s simply a community-driven series of webpages. Of course, the latter sounds much less impressive than claiming one is “an open-source encyclopedia.” But Jimmy Wales and the rest of them cannot trade on the semiotics of encyclopedias and reference materials while obsequiously and self-righteously denying the very attributes that make encyclopedias and references worthwhile.
It is a situation very similar to that of licensing medical professionals. There is a certain cachet associated with a medical degree, with being a doctor. There are also matters of responsibility that attach to those positions. So society licenses doctors to prevent abuse of the term by those who would redirect our goodwill and the social necessity of doctors for personal gain. Can you be medically knowledgeable without having a medical license? Yes. Are you allowed to call yourself a doctor? No.
Wikipedia should either drastically reformulate its content model to ensure transactional integrity and accuracy, or it should stop calling itself an encyclopedia. The buzzword is “Web 2.0,” not “Have Your Cake and Eat It 2.0.”
A few weeks ago, John Seigenthaler, Sr., a respected journalist (and partial founder of The Tennessean newspaper, which I used to read as I’m originally from Tennessee), found a biographical page on Wikipedia dedicated to him. One of the points argued was that Mr. Seigenthaler might have been responsible for the assassination of Robert Kennedy (whom Sirhan Sirhan assassinated in ’69). This made Mr. Seigenthaler upset, not just for the implication that he was a primary mover in a tinfoil-hat conspiracy, but also because he had been a very close friend of Mr. Kennedy, and, in fact, one of his pallbearers. He challenged the open-source “encyclopedia” publicly, denouncing its self-positioning as a reference tool, and argued for contributors’ accountability.
Depending on your particular information resource on the Internet, this was met with a number of responses. From staunch Wikipedia contributors or supporters, there was a blame the victim approach—“If Mr. Seigenthaler wanted his entry to be accurate, he should have maintained the page himself.” From the mainstream public, there was one of confusion—“What’s a ‘Wikipedia’?” From the Wikipedia founder, Jimmy Wales, there was one of grudging but essentially unhelpful response—“We no longer allow anonymous individuals to create new pages. They can still edit them anonymously, though.” And from the mass of glib nerd-elitists at Slashdot, there was mostly one of smug superiority—“Well, of course Wikipedia’s inaccurate. Why wasn’t Seigenthaler using a real reference?”
Then, in the week of 12 December 2005, we learn that the man who changed Mr. Seiganthaler’s entry did so as a joke. He claimed ignorance of Wikipedia’s solemnity, and denied that he knew anyone would ever use the site as a serious reference tool. Wikipedia is now changing their user policy to mitigate the PR damage done by this debacle.
I started doing some thinking.
Why is it that Wikipedia’s current content model is inadequate? Can the hacks who rely on aphorisms and stupid sayings be correct? I declare that the nature of Wikipedia is dynamic equilibrium, and it is in this mode that the open-source “encyclopedia” presents a startling opportunity as well as a staggering miscalculation.
Dynamic equilibrium is a term used in the physical sciences to describe a system in motion, so long as that motion produces no net change in the contents of the system. For example, aqueous ammonia. If you place ammonia in water, there is a constant reaction occurring (powered simply by the energy of the molecules themselves) that converts ammonia (NH4) to (H30 + NH3). As just mentioned, the reaction is not particularly energetic, and so the energy of collision is enough to create the H30 + NH3, and the unstable nature of H30 allows for decay into H20 and H+ (and because of the nature of negatively-charged NH3, the positively-charged free hydrogen ion is immediately snapped up). We are then left with NH4 and H20 again. So the cycle repeats.
This is useful for us because we are using the entirety of the aqueous ammonia solution to perform our purposes—that is, we are utilizing the ammonia on the macro level instead of on the molecular level. Thus, a dynamic equilibrium of solution is perfectly capable of meeting our needs.
With Wikipedia, there is a similar regard toward dynamic equilibrium, given an article’s popularity and an invested user base. If there are enough people who care about an article, and who have it tracked in the software, then when someone vandalizes or makes an article unintentionally inaccurate, then it will be corrected. Given a long enough timeframe, the article will be a finely-honed resource of accurate information protected from further defacement.
The only problem is that no single human being on the face of the earth interacts with anything on the Internet at the macro level. It’s simply not useful. Instead, all our interactions with Wikipedia are granular, molecular, transactional. Thus we reap no benefit from the dynamic equilibrium model of content protection, because we are not involved in the process over a long timeframe. Instead, we need reliable results at any random moment for any given transaction. Dynamic equilibrium simply cannot do this, because the particles involved still behave randomly (and to remove random behavior is to kill the dynamism). When you access a page, you are essentially taking a shot in the dark as to whether or not those materials are accurate. You cannot guarantee, and neither can Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, what state that page will be in. To return to chemistry, it is like attempting to track any single NH4 molecule through solution and expecting it to remain NH4 at every point along the way.
This is the problem with Wikipedia. Its accuracy can only be guaranteed in the eventuality of several transaction cycles. And since any single page view is the product of only one transaction, this means that unless the open-source website makes radical revisions to its content model, it should simply stop calling itself an “encyclopedia.”
What’s the big deal? you may ask. Why should we be concerned about its content model or its name? Isn’t it just a website? Besides, they put up disclaimers about accuracy and reliability.
That is exactly my point. The problem is, you can’t have it both ways. Either Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, with all the requirements and strictures about accuracy and liability, or it’s simply a community-driven series of webpages. Of course, the latter sounds much less impressive than claiming one is “an open-source encyclopedia.” But Jimmy Wales and the rest of them cannot trade on the semiotics of encyclopedias and reference materials while obsequiously and self-righteously denying the very attributes that make encyclopedias and references worthwhile.
It is a situation very similar to that of licensing medical professionals. There is a certain cachet associated with a medical degree, with being a doctor. There are also matters of responsibility that attach to those positions. So society licenses doctors to prevent abuse of the term by those who would redirect our goodwill and the social necessity of doctors for personal gain. Can you be medically knowledgeable without having a medical license? Yes. Are you allowed to call yourself a doctor? No.
Wikipedia should either drastically reformulate its content model to ensure transactional integrity and accuracy, or it should stop calling itself an encyclopedia. The buzzword is “Web 2.0,” not “Have Your Cake and Eat It 2.0.”
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