MSM BLOG
What's a Wiki worth?
I keep finding myself in the same conversation regarding the value of Wiki's - well, it starts out as a value topic and leads right into one of dependability of source at best. Those who I discuss the topic with seem to believe strongly that facts found on the Internet are opinion at best, uneducated, biased, and particularly suspect. In fact, to them the entire issue is a non-issue and I usually get the "I'm in the room with a fanatic, get me out of here" look as though I've just found and questioned their deepest faith. Well, to question faith can set off a passionate response triggering the end of the discussion and the beginning of the argument. On the question of questioning faith, lets just say that it's fun if you like a little danger - be ready to duck.

Because this is a blog, where I'm expected to share my knowledge and entitled to share my opinion, we will start with an unresearched view on the subject then do the research afterward. This means that I may very well find myself completely wrong. Sound like fun?

There are two obvious differences between internet fact, in this case congealed in wiki's, and printed fact - let's focus on general topic encyclopedias.

The first is that wiki contributors are unrestricted and in many cases completely anonymous. The second difference is volume of contributors. The assumptions are that printed references have far fewer contributors and have contributors who are carefully qualified by even fewer people.

Lets lookup my assumptions before going on... Using Wikipedia as a fairly safe example and Encyclopedia Britanica, looks like Wikipedia has no number for contributors, probably because it allows anonymous contributions (over the Internet) - Britanica has 19 full-time editors and over 4000 expert contributors, wow. Well let's see if we can guage Wikipedia's contributor base from other measurements. It is apparently in the top 10 most frequently visited websites, there are about 1.4 billion users of the Internet growing at 290% per year (of 6.7 billion people increasing at 2.2% per year). Wikipedia contains about 2.4 million articles (1.7 billion words), Britanica has about half a million topics (4 million words). It seems safe to assume that Wikipedia has a fair bit more contributors. If you haven't figured it out by now, I practice the art of understatement - Wikipedia probably has well over a million contributors. The number of contributors per subject must be significantly lower for Britanica, especially when you consider that 19 people get the final word on everything.

At this point, we're sitting with two important questions. In fact, I submit that we need to decide which of these questions we're actually trying to answer. They are: Which form of reference publication is more accurate? and Which form of publication can we trust? Lets start with the trust question. Trust is essentially a matter of faith and in a search for truth, faith needs to be temporarily set aside. Faith is the acceptance of some unknown truth because we've told ourselves that it's safe to do so. For the moment (until we stop thinking and bring faith back into the room) lets deal with the simple question of accuracy. Is the information of many anonymous people more likely to be correct (ie. accurate) than the information of much fewer identified people. Why don't we start by assuming that by default, no one is going to just make stuff up, and lets assume that the appointed and self appointed experts on any give subject are not imposters and that they have some degree of direct knowledge on the subject to which they speak. This brings into question the wisdom and knowledge of the 19 non-experts who get the final word on Britanica's publications. They not only get to decide what facts to publish, but who's expert facts to publish. We can further assume that these people are the wisest of wise and are acting in impecably good faith. But faith none the less - how did we get back to the trust issue? It seems that these 19 people are performing the research into all human knowledge on our behalf. That's a lot of faith, seriously. But what's the alternative? We have direct access through the Internet to information