The debate about whom to trust – Wikipedia or Encyclopedia Britannica – is fascinating because it reveals so much about the changing nature of “authority” in modern culture. Does authority reside in “experts” who can legitimately tell the rest of us what is truth? Or do the smart mobs of the global network constitute the real authority because their sheer numbers are able to verify and debunk with greater ease than a Harvard professor or Nobel scientist? This seems to be a dispute that won’t go away, at least in the eyes of the mainstream media.
One of the most recent dustups occurred when a prankster changed a Wikipedia entry on the Kennedy assassination to link (falsely) a prominent journalist to the crime. I once attended a conference at which Madeline Albright consulted the entry in Wikipedia only to discover that as U.S. Secretary of State she had met with Saddam Hussein (not true). At the same conference, on the other hand, the great physicist Murray Gell-Mann declared the entry on him pretty accurate.
George Johnson recently probed this issue in The New York Times (January 3, 2006), in a commentary,“The Nitpicking of the Masses vs. the Authority of the Experts.” He cited a study by the journal Nature that did comparative analyses of 42 entries in both Wikipedia and Encyclopedia Britannica to determine which contained more errors. I was surprised to see that the error ratio was essentially a draw. Wikipedia averaged five errors per article, while Encyclopedia Britannica had four. While most of these errors involved hard, verifiable “facts,” there were also issues of factual interpretation: is it an error to refer to the embittering agent used to denature ethanol as “denatonium,” when the more accurate term is “denatonium benzoate”? Is it an error when the modern name of an Italian town, Crotene, is used instead of its ancient name, Crotona?
It’s a good thing that someone tried to do a rigorous comparative assessment of Wikipedia vs. Encyclopedia Britannica. But the real point of this controversy, and the reason it persists, is that it is a proxy for a larger debate about who is more authoritative – the mainstream media or Internet commons.
David Weinberger, editor of JOHO (The Journal of the Hyperlinked Organization), and one of the authors of the Cluetrain Manifesto, wrote a wonderful critique of this issue called “ Why the Media Can’t Get Wikipedia Right?” He argues that the narrative storyline of media accounts of Wikipedia invariably go something like this:
A person of indisputable honor was smeared in Wikipedia. Faced with incontrovertible evidence of its failings, the mainstream media shamed Wikipedia into reluctantly becoming more like them. See, Wikipedia was unreliable all along, just like we said! We’re the grownups, and now we’re making Wikipedia grow up.
Weinberger cites all sorts of “authoritative” news organizations – The Guardian, Agence France-Presse, C-NET l – who developed this line and made their own erroneous statements about how Wikipedia works. They seem to think that knowledge is credible only if its comes swathed in elite credentials and leather-bound bindings. The media have trouble understanding that “knowledge” can be an evolving social work-in-progress – something that Wikipedia admits with humility and honesty.
When was the last time you saw The New York Times own up to its errors – and not just misspelled names, but false reports of WMDs in Iraq and withholding the story about NSA spying on citizens? While Wikipedia strives to correct its errors quickly, the errors in Encyclopedia Britannica will be there on library shelves for years, if not decades, to come. Yet who can dispute that the contributors to Encyclopedia Britannica have real expertise and knowledge, which may or may not be true for self-selected Wikipedia contributors.
At a certain level, this whole debate is silly. Both encyclopedias are valuable, and can be used and assessed in different ways. But how revealing that so many “authoritative” sources of knowledge, especially new organizations, are freaked out by the social construction and validation of knowledge.