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Sam Vaknin : Wikipedia’s Six Cardinal Sins

February 29th, 2008 by The Review

The following post was written by Sam Vaknin, author and a noted critic of Wikipedia. The piece was in response to an article supporting Wikipedia that appeared in Science Progress journal, and is reproduced here with the author’s permission.

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It is a question of time before the Wikipedia self-destructs and implodes. It poses such low barriers to entry (anyone can edit any number of its articles) that it is already attracting masses of teenagers as “contributors” and “editors”, not to mention the less savory flotsam and jetsam of cyber-life. People who are regularly excluded or at least moderated in every other Internet community are welcomed, no questions asked, by this wannabe self-styled “encyclopedia”

Six cardinal (and, in the long-term, deadly) sins plague this online venture. What unites and underlies all its deficiencies is simple: Wikipedia dissembles about what it is and how it operates. It is a self-righteous confabulation and its success in deceiving the many attests not only to the gullibility of the vast majority of Netizens but to the PR savvy of its sleek and slick operators.

1. The Wikipedia is opaque and encourages recklessness

The overwhelming majority of contributors to and editors of the Wikipedia remain anonymous or pseudonymous throughout the process. Anyone can register and members’ screen-names (handles) mean nothing and lead nowhere. Thus, no one is forced to take responsibility for what he or she adds to the “encyclopedia” or subtracts from it.

This amounts to an impenetrable smokescreen: identities can rarely be established and evading the legal consequences of one’s actions or omissions is easy. As the exposure of the confabulated professional biography of Wikipedia Arbitrator Essjay in March 2007 demonstrates, some prominent editors and senior administrators probably claim fake credentials as well.

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Posted at 2:52 am, February 29th, 2008 by The Review in Critics | 2 Comments

Wikipedia: Putting Reliable Sources Out of Business

February 24th, 2008 by Kato

Two important Wikipedia related stories were published this week. These stories illustrate why people should take Wikipedia’s negative impact on our culture seriously, before it is too late.

The first report told of the collapse of the leading French Print Encyclopedia Quid, which canceled its annual publication due to lack of advance sales, citing competition from Wikipedia for the shortfall. According to the Independent Newspaper:

The book’s publisher, Robert Laffont, says the whole concept of the print encyclopedia can no longer compete with the free information available on the Internet. Quid, produced by a family team for the past 45 years, has suffered especially at the hands of the French-language version of Wikipedia, the do-it-yourself web encyclopaedia.

Meaning that a legitimate, credible body of work has become the first major conquest in Jimbo Wales’s cultural war.

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Posted at 2:31 am, February 24th, 2008 by Kato in Critics, Accuracy | 1 Comment

What is the life expectancy of Wikipedia?

January 10th, 2008 by The Review

The Review’s resident Wikipedia-Watcher, Daniel Brandt, submitted this focused post to the forum on Christmas Eve 2007.

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What is the life expectancy of Wikipedia?

  1. It has a scandal-prone structure, from the Board of Trustees right down to “anyone can edit” — which includes an anon editing an article on Seigenthaler that sat there for four months.
  2. The person most closely associated with Wikipedia loves his celebrity status but prefers to spin away over Wikipedia’s problems rather than deal with them.
  3. The social networking model, from Wikipedia, to Orkut in Brazil, to Napster, Grokster, and YouTube and copyright, is headed for a more restrictive legal environment.
  4. To the extent that any sort of wiki-type “encyclopedia” survives, it will probably have to go with non-anonymous editing. Examples are Citizendium, and Google’s Knol.
  5. The funds from donations will not be sufficient to sustain the needs of the Wikimedia Foundation. If Google is serious about Knol, it may even be too late to start showing ads on Wikipedia. Google is not likely to rank Wikipedia well if it competes with Knol.
  6. The mainstream media is losing its infatuation with Wikipedia.

I give it three more years.