Criticism of Wikipedia
Criticism of Wikipedia has increased along with its size. Notable criticisms include that its open nature makes Wikipedia unauthoritative and unreliable, that it exhibits
systemic bias, and that its
group dynamics hinder its goals.
Usefulness as a reference
Wikipedia should not be used as a primary source for serious research according to Wikipedia Founder, Jimmy Wales. The lack of authority, accountability, and
peer review have all been sources of criticism. For example, librarian Philip Bradley acknowledged in an interview with
The Guardian that the concept behind the site was in theory a "lovely idea," but that he would not use it in practice, and that he is "not aware of a single librarian who would. The main problem is the lack of authority. With printed publications, the publishers have to ensure that their data is reliable, as their livelihood depends on it. But with something like this, all that goes out the window."
[ ]Likewise,
Robert McHenry, former editor-in-chief of
Encyclopædia Britannica said: "The user who visits Wikipedia to learn about some subject, to confirm some matter of fact, is rather in the position of a visitor to a public restroom. It may be obviously dirty, so that he knows to exercise great care, or it may seem fairly clean, so that he may be lulled into a false sense of security. What he certainly does not know is who has used the facilities before him."
[ ]Discover magazine noted in its March 2006 issue that "[s]cience entries in Wikipedia, the open-source online encyclopedia that anyone can edit, are nearly as error-free as those in
Encyclopædia Britannica, according to a team of expert reviewers." This figure comes from the comparative study performed by science journal
Nature a few months prior. The study performed in
Nature has not been without criticism. For example,
Andrew Orlowski wrote an editorial for
The Register which claims "Nature sent only misleading fragments of some Britannica articles to the reviewers, sent extracts of the children's version and Britannica's 'book of the year' to others, and in one case, simply stitched together bits from different articles and inserted its own material, passing it off as a single Britannica entry."
[ ] Nature disputes these claims.
Suitability as an encyclopedia
Critics such as McHenry have said that Wikipedia errs in billing itself as an
encyclopedia, because that word implies a level of authority and accountability that an openly editable reference work allegedly cannot possess. McHenry argues that "to the ordinary user, the turmoil and uncertainty that may lurk beneath the surface of a Wikipedia article are invisible. He or she arrives at a Wikipedia article via Google, perhaps, and sees that it is part of what claims to be an "encyclopedia". This is a word that carries a powerful connotation of reliability. The typical user doesn't know how conventional encyclopedias achieve reliability, only that they do."
[ ]Frequent Wikipedia critic
Andrew Orlowski writes:
If what we today know as 'Wikipedia' had started life as something called, let's say — 'Jimbo's Big Bag O'Trivia' — we doubt if it would be the problem it has become. Wikipedia is indeed, as its supporters claim, a phenomenal source of pop culture trivia. Maybe a 'Big Bag O'Trivia' is all Jimbo ever wanted. Maybe not.
For sure a libel is a libel, but the outrage would have been far more muted if the Wikipedia project didn't make such grand claims for itself. The problem with this vanity exercise is one that it's largely created for itself. The public has a firm idea of what an 'encyclopedia' is, and it's a place where information can generally be trusted, or at least slightly more trusted than what a labyrinthine, mysterious bureaucracy can agree upon, and surely more trustworthy than a piece of spontaneous graffiti — and Wikipedia is a king-sized cocktail of the two.
Jerry Holkins of
Penny Arcade noted in an essay accompanying an online webcomic that the "response [to criticisms of Wikipedia] is: the collaborative nature of the apparatus means that the right data tends to emerge, ultimately, even if there is turmoil temporarily as dichotomous viewpoints violently intersect." However, Holkins is merely restating others' defenses here, not his own opinion, for in the same essay, Holkins refers to Wikipedia as a "kind of
quantum encyclopedia, where genuine data both exists and
doesn't exist depending on the precise moment I rely upon your discordant fucking mob for my information."
on his Wikipedia page.]]
Academic circles have not been entirely dismissive of Wikipedia as a source of information. Wikipedia articles have been referenced in "enhanced perspectives" provided on-line in the journal
Science. The first of these perspectives to provide a hyperlink to Wikipedia was "A White Collar Protein Senses Blue Light"
[ (subscription access only)], and dozens of enhanced perspectives have provided such links since then. However, these links are offered as background sources for the reader, not as sources used by the writer, and the "enhanced perspectives" are not intended to serve as reference material themselves.
Anti-elitism as a weakness
Former editor-in-chief of
Nupedia,
Larry Sanger, stated in an opinion piece in
Kuro5hin that "anti-elitism" — active contempt for expertise — was rampant among Wikipedia editors and supporters. He further stated that "[f]ar too much credence and respect [is] accorded to people who in other Internet contexts would be labeled 'trolls'."
A common Wikipedia maxim is "Out of mediocrity, excellence."
Jimmy Wales, the site's founder, admits that wide variations in quality between different articles and topics is not insignificant, but that he considers the average quality to be "pretty good," getting better by the day.
Staff at the
Encyclopædia Britannica say it does not feel threatened by Wikipedia. "The premise of Wikipedia is that continuous improvement will lead to perfection; that premise is completely unproven," the reference work's executive editor, Ted Pappas, told
The Guardian.
Systemic bias in coverage
Wikipedia has been accused of
systemic bias, a tendency to cover topics in a detail disproportionate to their importance. Even the site's proponents admit to this flaw. In an interview with
The Guardian, Dale Hoiberg, the editor-in-chief of
Encyclopædia Britannica, noted that "people write of things they're interested in, and so many subjects don't get covered; and news events get covered in great detail. The entry on
Hurricane Frances is more than five times the length of that on
Chinese art, and the entry on
Coronation Street is twice as long as the article on
Tony Blair."
As of May 2006 the Wikipedia articles
Chinese art and
Tony Blair are longer than
Hurricane Frances and
Coronation Street; however, other examples certainly may exist.
Systemic bias in perspective
A more difficult problem to address is that, even when topics are covered, they are covered from what seems to be a
neutral point of view to the current participants only, which may not meet the neutrality standards of the current readership as a whole, or of the potential readership.
While some critics have raised this issue, they have been unsatisfied with the response. For example, a 2002 attempt to ask questions about what would be required to prepare Wikipedia for the
one billionth user went nowhere. Since that time, there have been numerous efforts to address the difference between neutral point of view and the perspective of new contributors with views typical of some large group of people, but not typical of the average Wikipedia contributor. In response to this issue, a group of Wikipedia contributors on the English Wikipedia have established a WikiProject,
Wikipedia:WikiProject Countering systemic bias. They have a list of
open tasks which detail various areas they have determined need to be resolved.
The concept of a neutral point of view itself has itself been
criticized as being misleading, impossible, and sometimes even offensive in its results. Some critics and even some contributors say that a NPOV is an unattainable ideal, although this does not rule out the possibility of a close approximation being reached. Other critics allege that NPOV is arguably in practice "mainstream point of view," with the effect that mainstream points of view are privileged and radical points of view disadvantaged.
It can also be argued that, in many topics, a truly NPOV is an unattainable dream. For topics dealing with objective, easily-measurable phenomena, NPOV is easy to achieve. For example,
inductance is a physical electrical property that can be readily measured, and will not vary according to people's social, political, economic, cultural or spiritual perspectives. However, the full spectrum of readers of an article on
George W Bush might be unable to agree on much more than the fact that this individual is the 43rd President of the United states. There are a great many articles where contributors have peacefully posted an alternative viewpoint without changing or removing text they don't agree with, only to have their alternative perspective promptly reverted out of existence.
Difficulty of fact-checking
Wikipedia contains no formal
peer review process for fact-checking, and due to the lack of requiring qualifications to edit any article, the contributors themselves may not be well-versed in the topics they write about. Since the bulk of Wikipedia's fact-checking involves an internet search (which may find mirrors of Wikipedia, including some which do not clearly acknowledge their nature as such), self-perpetuating errors occur. The amount of fact-checking on any given page is directly related to the number of frequent contributors to the page, with the result that errors on obscure topics may remain for some time. Even in pages with dozens of contributors, a fact erroneously inserted along with dozens of other changes may "slip" into a page and stay. Although such erroneous information may eventually be caught and changed, until that time, the page is displaying misinformation which may well be propagated to many web sites outside of Wikipedia.
This particular criticism is Wikipedia's most frequently encountered weakness in reality. Sometimes, the subject of a biographical article must fix blatant lies about his own life. [
1]
Stephen Colbert lampooned this drawback of Wikipedia, calling it
wikiality.
In a typical experiment, an editor inserted mistakes into five Wikipedia articles; they remained unnoticed for up to five days by which time the editor reverted the edits himself[
2]. A
fictitious entry was once inserted into Wikipedia that lasted for five months.[
3] Another hoax article, created on April Fools' Day 2005, was not deleted until January 2006 [
4].
Use of dubious sources
Wikipedia requests that contributors verify the accuracy of information by checking the references cited, which generally come from external sources. Many of these articles often do not include references for statements made, nor do the articles differentiate between true, false, and opinion. Some critics contend that the references have come from
dubious sources, such as
blog entries. For example, a blog entry may contain several inaccuracies and stereotypes, because many bloggers may have their own self-interests. Critics contend that use of such unsound references give legitimacy to articles, which contain many falsehoods.
Hiawatha Bray of the
Boston Globe wrote: "So of course Wikipedia is popular. Maybe too popular. For it lacks one vital feature of the traditional encyclopedia:
accountability. Old-school reference books hire expert scholars to write their articles, and employ skilled editors to check and double-check their work. Wikipedia's articles are written by anyone who fancies himself an expert.".
Exposure to vandals
In
2005, Wikipedia received a great deal of bad publicity as a result of the
John Seigenthaler Sr. Wikipedia biography controversy, in which a then-unknown
vandal created a biographical page on
Seigenthaler containing numerous false and defamatory statements; this page went unnoticed for several months until discovered by
Victor S. Johnson, Jr., a friend of Seigenthaler. Likewise, numerous other pages have been attacked and defaced by vandals; either with axes to grind against a particular subject (then defamed or unfairly and unencyclopedically criticized in a Wikipedia article); or against Wikipedia itself. There have even been instances of Wikipedia critics injecting false information into Wikipedia in order to "test" the system and demonstrate its alleged unreliability.
Wikipedia itself acknowledges these issues. "Researching with Wikipedia", a "project page" (that is, part of the Wikipedia site, though not part of the encyclopedia as such), states, "Wikipedia's radical openness means that any given article may be, at any given moment, in a bad state: for example it could be in the middle of a large edit or it could have been recently vandalized. While blatant vandalism is usually easily spotted and rapidly corrected, Wikipedia is certainly more subject to subtle vandalism than a typical reference work." [
5]
Wikipedia has numerous tools available to contributors (and several more available only to administrators) in order to combat vandalism; proponents of the encyclopedia argue that the vast majority of attacks on Wikipedia are detected and reverted within a short time frame (one study by
IBM found that most vandalism on Wikipedia is reverted in about 5 minutes [
6][
7]). This is not necessarily the case, though. Vandalism such as page-blanking and the addition of offensive pictures are easily reverted within a couple of minutes. However, more prolific vandalism may be able to stay for longer. For example, a user recently made several extremely racist edits to
Martin Luther King Day and the edits were not reverted for nearly 4 hours ([
8]). Notwithstanding such assurances, there have been several incidents where defamatory, unsubstantiated, or manifestly untrue claims have persisted in current versions of Wikipedia articles for significant amounts of time, the Seigenthaler incident being the most prominent such incident to date. Supporters of Wikipedia also frequently claim that undetected vandalism mainly is an issue with low-profile articles. Most undetected vandalizing edits are done by registered users, which are often reviewed less often than those by anonymous users.
Scholarly-sounding vandalism isn't easily detected because it is well written and fits the style of the article. If someone added a line saying that a famous person "farts all the time," it might be quickly erased. A scholarly-sounding paragraph about
flatulence existed for over a month in a Wikipedia biography:
Never the one to be embarrassed by life's peculiarities, Larry King has often been said to have a bit of a flatulence habit while on air at CNN, which isn't curbed by having guests in the studio. A favorite moment of his, and an often repeated story, involved an interview conducted with former President Jimmy Carter who, after some length of time in studio, chided Larry & asked him to please stop, or he'd have to end the interview. Larry ever present in the moment adeptly steered the conversation to global warming and the effects of bovine emissions on the ozone.
Such postings violate numerous Wikipedia policies, most importantly Wikipedia's policy on
verifiability.
Additionally, the issue of vandalism detection is an important one. Most vandalism is detected via "Recent changes", a listing of all recent edits. As such, even obvious vandalism that slips by those who watch for vandalism may remain undetected for several weeks, or even months.
Exposure to political operatives and advocates
While Wikipedia has a policy requiring articles to have a , it is not immune from attempts by outsiders with an agenda to place a
spin on articles. In
January 2006 it was revealed that several staffers of members of the
U.S. House of Representatives had embarked on a campaign to cleanse their respective bosses' biographies on Wikipedia, as well as inserting negative remarks on political opponents. References to a campaign promise by
Martin Meehan to surrender his seat in
2000 were deleted by Meehan's staffers, and a congressional staffer inserted a comment in the article on
Bill Frist claiming he is "ineffective". Some of the remarks were well outside the usual bounds of fair comment, such as a claim that
Eric Cantor, a congressman from
Virginia, "smells like cow dung".
In an interview, Wikipedia founder
Jimmy Wales remarked that the changes were "not cool".
Numerous other changes were made from an
IP address which is assigned to the House of Representatives.
In a similar vein, the
Microsoft Vista article once read like an advertisement for the product, instead of a factual article with a neutral point of view. While it is not certain that the article was edited by
Microsoft, the use of marketing buzzwords such as "technologies" was sufficient to merit a rewording of the article.
Various individuals and groups that hold different political opinions may also start
edit wars aimed at spinning the content of one article or even entire wikipedias. The various conflict management policies of wikipedia are often ineffective when opposed by determined editors, as the conflict around the
Moldovan wikipedia shows. This wikipedia is the creation of a single user
User:Node ue, that cannot contribute to it otherwise than by copying content from the
Romanian wikipedia and changing script from Latin to Cyrillic. Despite several motions to delete it, the Moldovan wikipedia still exists, as a haven for trolls.
Soon after disgraced former
Enron CEO
Kenneth Lay passed away due to a
heart attack, several editors to the encyclopedia added content to Lay's Wikipedia biography surmising that the death was in fact a
suicide; well in advance of any official determination of cause of death. Such edits were reverted and re-inserted several times; eventually the article reported the cause of death as a heart attack. At this time, there is no evidence to suggest that Lay's death was by other than natural causes. The edit history of the article was investigated by the press, and
Reuters wrote an article on the subject. [
9]
Privacy concerns
Most privacy concerns refer to cases of government or employer data gathering; or to computer or electronic monitoring; or to trading data between organizations. See
LEGAL ISSUES IN EMPLOYEE PRIVACY for example. The concern in the case of Wikipedia is the right of a private citizen to remain private; to not move from being a "private citizen" tobeing a "public figure" in the eyes of the law (see [
10] for the legal distinction). It is somewhat of a battle between the right to be anonymous in
cyberspace and the right be anonymous in
real life (
meatspace).
"[T]he Internet has created conflicts between personal privacy, commercial interests and the interests of society at large" warns James Donnelly and Jenifer Haeckl in
PRIVACY AND SECURITY ON THE INTERNET: What Rights, What Remedies?.
Balancing the rights of all concerned as technology alters the social landscape will not be easy. It "is not yet possible to anticipate the path of the common law or governmental regulation" regarding this problem. [
11].
Daniel Brandt's Wikipedia Watch
[http://wikipedia-watch.org/usatoday.html] states "Wikipedia is a potential menace to anyone who values
privacy. [...] A greater degree of accountability in the Wikipedia structure, as discussed above, would also be the very first step toward resolving the privacy problem."
[http://wikipedia-watch.org/hivemind.html]A particular problem occurs in the case of an individual who is relatively unimportant and for whom there exists a Wikipedia page against their will. An argument can be sustained that if the person, for example, has mental health problems, the public's right to know about such an unimportant individual is easily outweighed by the detrimental effects of the Wikipedia page on such an individual.
In January 2006, a
German court ordered the
German-language Wikipedia shut down within Germany due to its publication of the full name of
Boris Floricic, aka "Tron", a deceased hacker who was formerly with the
Chaos Computer Club. More specifically, the court ordered that the URL within the German
.de domain (
http://www.wikipedia.de/) may no longer redirect to the encyclopedia's servers in Florida at
http://de.wikipedia.org/, though since German readers are still able to use the US-based URL directly, there is not really any loss of access on their part. The court order arose out of a lawsuit filed by Floricic's parents, demanding that their son's surname be removed from Wikipedia. [
12] This decision has either been reversed or is not observed.
Other countries may also have
privacy laws which come into conflict with Wikipedia's editorial policies, which are heavily dependent on free speech laws in effect in the U.S., and generally permit publication of anything which is and does not contain an inappropriate .
Quality concerns
Many critics of Wikipedia – as well as many Wikipedia editors– have observed that the quality of articles varies widely, even when controversial topics are excluded from the discussion. Some articles are excellent by any reasonable measure – authored and edited by persons knowledgeable in the field, containing numerous useful and relevant references, and written in a proper encyclopedic style. However, there are many articles on Wikipedia which are amateurish, unauthoritative, and even incorrect, making it difficult for a reader unfamiliar with the subject matter to know which articles are correct and which are not. In addition, Wikipedia contains many articles which are
stubs – articles which provide a brief definition of a term, and little else.
Others have noted that in some areas, such as
science, Wikipedia's quality is often excellent. A report by
Nature, a highly-regarded scientific journal, finds that "
Wikipedia comes close to
Britannica in terms of the accuracy of its
science entries"[
13]. The article detailed a study wherein 42 articles in both encyclopedias were reviewed by experts on the subject matter. Based on the review, the average Wikipedia article contained 4 errors or omissions; the average Britannica article, 3.
Encyclopædia Britannicas initial concerns led to Nature releasing further documentation of its survey method. [14]. Encyclopædia Britannica
, in its formal corporate response "Fatally Flawed" [15] (March 2006), responded that "[t]hat conclusion was false, however, because Nature's research was invalid. As we demonstrate below, almost everything about the journal's investigation, from the criteria for identifying inaccuracies to the discrepancy between the article text and its headline, was wrong and misleading." However, Britannica'' also spun their mistakes:
Article: Mendeleev, Dmitry ["Mendeleyev, Dmitry Ivanovich"]::
Reviewer comment: Declaring him the 17th child is either incorrect or misleading. He is the 13th surviving child of 17 total.::
Britannica responds: We disagree with the reviewer's implications that there is full agreement that Mendeleev was the 13th surviving child. Our new article makes it clear that scholars are not uniform in their views on whether Mendeleyev was the 13th or 14th surviving child. (
source)
According to a BBC report [
16],
Nature has since rejected the
Britannica response. ([
17])
Threat to traditional publishers
Some observers claim that Wikipedia is undesirable, because it is an economic threat to publishers of traditional encyclopedias, many of whom may be unable to compete with a product which is essentially free.
Nicholas Carr writes in the essay
The amorality of Web 2.0, speaking of the so-called
Web 2.0 as a whole:
Wikipedia might be a pale shadow of the Britannica, but because it's created by amateurs rather than professionals, it's free. And free trumps quality all the time. So what happens to those poor saps who write encyclopedias for a living? They wither and die. The same thing happens when blogs and other free on-line content go up against old-fashioned newspapers and magazines. Of course the mainstream media sees the blogosphere as a competitor. It is a competitor. And, given the economics of the competition, it may well turn out to be a superior competitor. The layoffs we've recently seen at major newspapers may just be the beginning, and those layoffs should be cause not for self-satisfied snickering but for despair. Implicit in the ecstatic visions of Web 2.0 is the hegemony of the amateur. I for one can't imagine anything more frightening.
Others dispute the notion that Wikipedia, or similar efforts, will entirely displace traditional publications.
Anonymous editing
Wikipedia has been criticized by many for allowing users to edit anonymously, with only their
IP address to identify them. This is said to allow the vandals anonymity and makes it difficult to track them, due to the long and hard to remember nature of IP addresses. However IP edits reveal their IP address which can be used by admins to complain to ISPs or put range blocks in place or not to block because of possible blocking of regular contributors who share the same IP. Many have suggested making user registration required to edit articles, and as of
December 6,
2005 only registered users can create pages (Wales 2005).
Copyright issues
A significant number of people have commented that many images, and some articles, are
copyright violations. Often images are uploaded and incorrectly tagged as
fair use, which is discouraged but not disallowed on Wikipedia. However, unless an image has a fair use criteria, it will likely be listed on images for deletion. There is also a copyright violations page where violations can be listed, and Wikipedia has their own
designated agent who can take down content when requested.
Flame wars
Some people predict that Wikipedia is going to end up as "just a bunch of
flame wars." This concern has been acknowledged by Wikipedia, which has developed a concept of "
Wikiquette" in response.
Fanatics and special interests
Several contributors have complained that editing Wikipedia is very tedious in the case of conflicts and that sufficiently dedicated contributors with idiosyncratic beliefs can push their point of view, because nobody has the time and energy to counteract the bias. Some contributors have alleged that informal Wikipedia coalitions work regularly to push and to suppress certain points of view. For example, they often allege that certain pages have been taken over by fanatics and special
interest groups.
[Findings of a mediator — "...that the participants are pro Perl POV pushing is fundamentally true...they actively tend to present material about Perl in the most favorable light...the article has a sympathetic point of view / apologist point of view. Certain types of evidence are given undue weight and other evidence is under-weighted."] These groups often revert the contributions of new contributors. This problem tends to occur most around controversial subjects, and sometimes results in revert wars and pages being locked down. In response, an Arbitration Committee has been formed on the English Wikipedia that deals with the worst offenders â€" though a conflict resolution strategy is actively encouraged before going to this extent. Also, to stop the continuous reverting of pages, Jimmy Wales introduced a "three revert rule", whereby those users who revert an article more than three times in a 24 hour period are blocked for 24 hours.
Censorship
Some argue that criticisms and commentary on certain topics are systematically excluded, deleted or reverted by self-appointed
censors, and that even attempts to make compromises or build up articles to include a variety of views are thwarted by uncompromising "vandal-editors" who simply remove or revert unwanted views that don't fit their agenda.
Other users have stated that Wikipedia attempts to suppress criticism of itself, citing the alleged treatment of
Wikipedia Review,
Wikitruth, and
Wikipedia Watch, Internet sites which are highly critical of the encyclopedia, as points in case. The sites have been generally been excluded from being listed as a reference in several Wikipedia articles. Critics charge that these sites are systematically excluded due to their anti-Wikipedia viewpoints. Encyclopedia administrators, on the other hand, have claimed that the websites,
Wikipedia Review in particular, fail to meet Wikipedia's standards as a reliable source [
18], and note that many websites and publications which are critical of Wikipedia
are included as sources by the encyclopedia.
Wikipedia's policy is to
fairly represent all sides of a
dispute by not making articles state, imply, or insinuate that only one side is correct; however it can be difficult for this policy to be enforced. [
19].
Abuse of power
Some contributors have quit after denouncing what they have described as abuses of power by Administrators and the Arbitration Committee. [
20] [
21] [
22] Such abuses include ignoring violations by Administrators and conducting Arbitration Committee actions which are in violation of the
policy.
It has also been alleged that there is a
cult-like reverence of leader
Jimmy Wales. The websites
Wikitruth.info and
Wikipedia Watch are among those that level this charge. References to "King Jimbo" and "Prince Danny" are often used in circles critical of Wikipedia, due in part to the fact that Wales and fellow Wikimedia Foundation employee Danny Wool are able to take unilateral action in stripping articles of perceived
bias where threats of
lawsuits or
libel charges are involved[
23]. This is reflective of the fact that, in spite of the communal nature of the project, leadership is nonetheless considered necessary. However, proponents of the project dismiss such accusations as little more than
hyperbole, and Wales himself has staunchly defended his position.
Level of Debate
The standard of debate has also been called into question by persons who have noted that contributors can make a long list of salient points and pull in a wide range of empirical observations to back up their arguments, only to have them ignored completely on the site.
Also, attempts to develop "standards" for articles pertaining to similar topics, or layouts of articles, can often become mired in a debate that goes round and round about who prefers what layout, with no end consensus being possible. An example of this is the endless debate as to whether all of the English Wikipedia should use British or American English exclusively. Due to the open-source nature of the Wikipedia project, it becomes impossible to establish and maintain standard article models and styles. Hence, editorial choices can often become the sole purview of person who have the most time to contribute to Wikipedia, whether or not their preferred style is accepted outside of Wikipedia.
In July of 2006, the
New Yorker Magazine featured a thorough critique and review of Wikipedia. The article included expert's criticisms of Wikipedia and the idea of an open edit encyclopedia. It detailed various problems with the enclopedia, including the apparent anti-elitism and vandalism. Several experts, including the president of
Encyclopædia Britannica,
Jorge Cauz, and the founder of Wikipedia,
Jimmy Wales, weighed in on the problems and the future of Wikipedia. Cauz stated that Wikipedia had "decline(d) into a hulking, mediocre mass of uneven, unreliable, and, many times, unreadable articles" and that "Wikipedia is to Britannica as 'American Idol' is to the Juilliard School."
.
Wales countered by stating that he would be more intimidated by Britannica if he didn't think that "they will be crushed out of existence within five years." However, Wales either failed to explain why he believed so, or it simply was not included in the article.
*
Andrew Orlowski*
:Category:Wikipedia critics*
Wikitruth.info*
* Written by an authority on the subject
* Written by an otherwise notable individual
* Appearing in, or referred to, by a notable and/or widely-circulated publication
* Can otherwise demonstrate SOME modicum of notability.
Articles (critical or otherwise) which fail to meet some notability standard, will likely be removed. This includes blog entries (unless the blogger or blog itself is notable), postings on Internet forums, other self-published articles, etc. This is not intended to be a laundry-list of articles critical of Wikipedia; use google (or another search engine) to find those.
Notable articles are welcome. -->
*
The Wikipedia FAQK,
Wired article that provides sarcastic advice to new Wikipedia contributors.
April 19,
2006*
Wiki wars, an article on
Red Herring about contentious articles on Wikipedia (registration required)
*
The Messiness of WikiDemocracy - by M.R.M. Parrott. Over-all positive but discusses some problems
*
A thirst for knowledge Guardian article by
Andrew Orlowski*
Turf Wars: Wikipedia spars with a splinter site for truth By Julian Dibbell
*
Times article*
Wikipedia Celebrates 750 Years Of American Independence The Onion's satirical view.
Dated links
*
Wikipedia Reputation and the Wemedia Project, quoting many people criticizing Wikipedia and others rebutting them. - by Ross Mayfield,
August 29 2004.
*
Wikipedia is a real-life Hitchhiker's Guide: huge, nerdy, and imprecise - by
Paul Boutin,
Slate,
May 3 2005.
*
Wikipedia: The Agony of Delete - by Rogers Cadenhead,
August 31 2005.
*
Can you trust Wikipedia? - by Mike Barnes,
The Guardian,
October 24 2005.
*
Wikipedia: magic, monkeys and typewriters - by
Andrew Orlowski,
The Register,
October 24 2005.
*
Can you trust Wikipedia? - by Elvira van Noort,
Mail & Guardian (South Africa),
November 7 2005.
*
A false Wikipedia 'biography' - by
John Seigenthaler Sr.,
USA Today,
November 29 2005.
*
"The Danger of Wikipedia",
Editor and Publisher,
November 30 2005. (Login required)
*
Snared in the Web of a Wikipedia Liar - by
Katharine Q. Seelye in
The New York Times,
December 3 2005.
*
Unreliable (adj): log on and see - by Rosemary Righter,
The Times,
December 9 2005*
Online encyclopedias put to the test - by Stephen Cauchi,
December 14 2005.
*
Founded On Porn, Wikipedia Shapes The Way You Think - by Jennifer Monroe,
December 15 2005.
*
Wikipedia science 31% more cronky than Britannica's - by Andrew Orlowski,
The Register,
December 16 2005.
*
"Wikipedia founder admits to serious quality problems" - by Andrew Orlowski,
The Register,
December 18 2005.
*
Wikipedia Founder Looks Out for Number 1 - by Rogers Cadenhead,
December 19 2005.
*
Wikipedia target of House 'editors' - by Evan Lehmann, TheTranscript.com,
January 30 2006.
*
Profs knock Wikipedia - by Brittany Anas,
February 6 2006. (Login required)
*
Neil Gaiman: What Bears Do On the Lawn, May 11, 2006, criticism of Wikipedia by noted author and essayist
Neil Gaiman.
*
"U. Florida cops ask fiction writer for fingerprints, DNA",
boingboing,
May 22 1006, retrieved
May 25 2006.
This article incorporates text from the GFDL Wikipedia article Wikipedia:Replies to common objections.
