Wikipedia - Can Teenagers Write An Encyclopedia? - Global Politician Options

[Google News]

Wikipedia - Can Teenagers Write An Encyclopedia?
Global Politician, NY - 12 minutes ago
The vast majority of Wikipedia contributors and editors are under the age of 25. Many of the administrators (senior editors) are in their teens. ...

[blissyu2]

Wow. Perhaps the best article ever to have been picked up by our RSS Feed Readers.

So many quotes, but I'd be filling this up with it if I included them all. Just one:

Google has changed its search algorithm in late 2005-early 2006. I have been monitoring 154 keywords on Google since 1999. Of these, the number one (#1) search result in 128 keywords is now a Wikipedia article. More than a quarter (38 out of 128) of these "articles" are what the Wikipedia calls "stubs" (one or two sentences to be expanded by Wikipedians in the future). Between 7 and 10 of the articles that made it to the much-coveted number one spot are ... empty pages, placeholders, yet to be written! (These results were obtained in early 2007).

Naturally (and sensibly) Sam doesn't reveal what the articles are, but I would suggest that that is pretty accurate. Wikipedia most greatly affects school students at an age where they begin to seriously write reference papers, between the ages of 12 and 18. Teenagers, in other words. At this age students don't yet know how to write quality essays and quality pieces on anything, and they are prone to take shortcuts. Teachers diligently teach how to use Google and other search engines (many teachers also take shortcuts and just teach Google), and lo and behold they are now therefore showing Wikipedia.

Many schools (I don't have figures, but I'd guess about 1/3) now ban Wikipedia from being able to be used as a reference in any school report, some even going so far as to ban Wikipedia from the school computers. But a lot still allow it. And for those that ban it, students can simply go to a Wikipedia article, copy the content, and then use Wikipedia's own references as their references in the project, thus simple plagiarism. Plagiarists R US.

Students of this age don't usually give a shit about whether Wikipedia is accurate or not - all that they care about is finishing their report, getting a good grade, and getting it over and done with. Wikipedia provides the means to do this.

And then after they've done this, then these students learn whatever it is that Wikipedia has shown to them. They then carry this information on as they get jobs, become journalists, teachers, and so forth. And lo and behold HISTORY IS CHANGED.

Many places already have used Wikipedia as a source, and have changed what the publicly accepted version of truth on that issue is. Wikipedia really is a major tool in public opinion.

The real problem with Wikipedia is what will happen in say 5 years' time, when the influential people in the world are all people who went through high school using Wikipedia as a reference for everything? You'd be in the minority if you didn't at least occasionally use it, and many of these people actually edit Wikipedia too.

Even if Wikipedia is completely destroyed in 5 years, its affects will be widespread. People will have a significantly distorted view of events. It is akin to Adolf Hitler's book burning, or Josef Stalin not allowing people in the Iron Curtain to hear about news from the west, or even modern day China not letting anyone inside hear about certain things outside. They are distorting truth.

There may not be anything sinister about Google, or MySpace, or any of the other companies mentioned here. But the thing is that in the end it doesn't matter whether it is deliberate misinformation or simply irresponsibly allowing it. The end result is the same. When these kids grow up with a distorted view of reality, there will be a lot of serious questions that Wikipedia will have to answer for.

[LamontStormstar]

The real problem with Wikipedia is what will happen in say 5 years' time, when the influential people in the world are all people who went through high school using Wikipedia as a reference for everything?

Lots of George W. Bushes in the government. With more things like staged town hall meetings and lies and using fear to gain support from the citizens.

Even if Wikipedia is completely destroyed in 5 years, its affects will be widespread. People will have a significantly distorted view of events. It is akin to Adolf Hitler's book burning, or Josef Stalin not allowing people in the Iron Curtain to hear about news from the west, or even modern day China not letting anyone inside hear about certain things outside. They are distorting truth.

When I want to look up stuff on Star Trek, I find memory alpha's wiki a better source of information than wikipedia.

Wikipedia will not die unless
1) Server costs get really expensive somehow.
2) All the admins and vandal fighters suddenly are unable to edit all at once like they get arthritis and then vandals will erode the encyclopedia so much it looks useless.
3) All major search engines ban it.
4) Everyone stops citing it all over the place like "Check out this thing on Wikipedia" and so it's not spread word of mouth like crazy.

[Kato]

This is a really good article.

Knowledge is not comprised of lists of facts, "facts", factoids, and rumors, the bread and butter of the Wikipedia. Real facts have to be verified, classified, and arranged within a historical and cultural context. Wikipedia articles read like laundry lists of information gleaned from secondary sources and invariably lack context and deep, true understanding of their subject matter.

[GoodFaith]

I submit that editors should be over age 21 and live within the jurisdiction of the United States. Admins should be at least 30 and pass a copyediting test.

[A Man In Black]

Knowledge is not comprised of lists of facts, "facts", factoids, and rumors, the bread and butter of the Wikipedia. Real facts have to be verified, classified, and arranged within a historical and cultural context. Wikipedia articles read like laundry lists of information gleaned from secondary sources and invariably lack context and deep, true understanding of their subject matter.

This is Wikipedia's primary limitation, something that cannot ever be solved without making it an entirely different project.

At it's best, it can only be an executive summary of the sources cited. (At worst, it reflects the biases and opinions and experiences of the last person to edit it.)

Wikipedia, because of its openness, cannot be the kind of encyclopedia traditional encyclopedias are, and it suffers for it. A traditional encyclopedia is the work of its authors, and can rest on their authority.

[GlassBeadGame]

At it's best, it can only be an executive summary of the sources cited.

Fair restatement of the "search engine" theory of Wikipedia. Usually considered to be a serious criticism.

[GoodFaith]

The real problem with Wikipedia is what will happen in say 5 years' time, when the influential people in the world are all people who went through high school using Wikipedia as a reference for everything?

Let's not go overboard. On purely academic subjects and pop culture, Wikipedia is pretty good. Where it touches politics, religion and anything of controversy, it sucks.

My problem is less with Wikipedia per se than with the unaccountable tribe of admins. Underage boys do not belong in positions of authority over adults. Nor should obsessive nuts be allowed to fight petty disputes on a global stage.

[thekohser]

I submit that editors should be over age 21 and live within the jurisdiction of the United States. Admins should be at least 30 and pass a copyediting test.

Hah! That would require proof of age, which would probably require proof of identity, and then Durova and Slim would explode. Won't work, but nice concept.

[A Man In Black]

I submit that editors should be over age 21 and live within the jurisdiction of the United States. Admins should be at least 30 and pass a copyediting test.

It seems like an obvious thing to point out, but one of the main reasons Wikipedia is so popular is because it's so open to contributions from anyone. (Who'da thunk that a populist project might become popular?) Ditching that openness would make Wikipedia...Citizendium.

Particularly the age thing; aren't you guys awfully hard on people who are supposedly paid to edit? Blocking the mass of bored teenagers and college students would mean that the only people who would edit Wikipedia are truly devoted POV pushers, the unemployed, and people who are there getting paid. But, then again, nobody would edit anyway because it wouldn't be very popular!

This post has been edited by A Man In Black: Mon 23rd July 2007, 3:29am

[GoodFaith]

It seems like an obvious thing to point out, but one of the main reasons Wikipedia is so popular is because it's so open to contributions from anyone.

This "anyone can edit" stuff just isn't true. Yes, Wikipedia does invite tens of thousands of vandals, which justifies the existence of admins.

Ditching that openness would make Wikipedia...Citizendium.

Teenage boys are teenage boys. They're too young and they have no business backing orders to their elders. Let them go to MySpace, so I can ignore them.

Particularly the age thing; aren't you guys awfully hard on people who are supposedly paid to edit? Blocking the mass of bored teenagers and college students would mean that the only people who would edit Wikipedia are truly devoted POV pushers, the unemployed, and people who are there getting paid.

We have POV pushers and hacks already. If the maturity level increased, it might win back those who are driven away by the current regime.

But, then again, nobody would edit anyway because it wouldn't be very popular!

There's always eb.com. :rolleyes:

[A Man In Black]

This "anyone can edit" stuff just isn't true. Yes, Wikipedia does invite tens of thousands of vandals, which justifies the existence of admins.

Which part? The claim that anyone can edit, or the claim that it's the source of Wikipedia's popularity?

We have POV pushers and hacks already. If the maturity level increased, it might win back those who are driven away by the current regime.

Well, my comments on that point are a little misplaced because there wouldn't be any Wikipedia without the volunteers, and there wouldn't be any volunteers if the obstacles to entry were set too high. (Again, Citizendium.)

[Somey]

Particularly the age thing; aren't you guys awfully hard on people who are supposedly paid to edit?

Not necessarily... it's just that it's hard for some people to imagine that a person can be paid to write from a "neutral point of view." The idea that anyone who's "paid to edit" is automatically a spammer and/or self-promoter shows either a failure of imagination or a simple refusal to admit the existence of exceptions to what's probably a general tendency.

The fact is, unless someone is up-front about it and essentially says "I'm being paid to edit WP," you can't possibly know in any given case. So you have to "assume good faith" and basically let them do it, at least up to the point where they become totally blatant about it. But if they admit to being paid, they're automatically labeled a "spammer" and must be banned forthwith. Hence the editors who are being paid are rewarded for deceptive behavior, but punished for honesty.

Of course, admins who may be getting paid to enforce a particular agenda using admin tools are a different story entirely... the question is "do they exist," and if so, which ones are they?

[GoodFaith]

This "anyone can edit" stuff just isn't true. Yes, Wikipedia does invite tens of thousands of vandals, which justifies the existence of admins.

Which part? The claim that anyone can edit, or the claim that it's the source of Wikipedia's popularity?

Wikipedia's success is solely due to hitting the PageRank jackpot. If Everything2 or Citizendium had won, things would be different.

We have POV pushers and hacks already. If the maturity level increased, it might win back those who are driven away by the current regime.

Well, my comments on that point are a little misplaced because there wouldn't be any Wikipedia without the volunteers, and there wouldn't be any volunteers if the obstacles to entry were set too high. (Again, Citizendium.)

Britannica has survived since 1768 with zero volunteers.

[A Man In Black]

Wikipedia's success is solely due to hitting the PageRank jackpot. If Everything2 or Citizendium had won, things would be different.

I'm not up on all the conspiracy theories, so you'll have to bear with me. Barring some sort of Diabolic Collusion between Google and WMF, high pagerank tends to come as a result of popularity, not the other way around. (I know the scrapers inflate this.) Wikipedia has managed to have a lot of users (and thus a lot of content) because they'll take literally everyone.

People tend to defend and promote things they feel they own, and there's no way to promote ownership more than by making someone a part of making something.

Britannica has survived since 1768 with zero volunteers.

Dissimilar case. Britannica isn't a volunteer project, and it rests as much on the authority of its authors (who are typically respected in their respective fields) as on the authority of its sources.

[blissyu2]

I think that the way that Wikipedia is designed lends it to high Google pageranks. Also, as discussed in the article, Google has recently changed their algorithm to give Wikipedia a higher page rank than their popularity indicates, i.e. thinking more highly of it than they do of a similar page that is not Wikipedia.

[Somey]

Barring some sort of Diabolic Collusion between Google and WMF, high pagerank tends to come as a result of popularity, not the other way around.

That's looking at it too simplistically, I'm afraid. The reason there's a problem is because of the snowball effect created by Google's ubiquity in conjunction with WP's high PageRanks. IOW, popularity leads to high PageRanks which increases popularity which further increases PageRanks, ad infinitum.

So the real problem isn't simply that Wikipedia is ranked too highly - it's that there's no way for more stable content to be ranked higher based on its stability when that stability is more appropriate to the content.

Google rewards sites that constantly change, because of the misassumption that change is always good, and that information is always updated to become more accurate, not less. That's good in the case of sports statistics, for example - up-to-date sports statistics are better than out-of-date sports statistics. But it's not good in the cases of history or biography, or a wide variety of other subjects that benefit from not being fiddled with on a near-daily basis.

The PageRank algorithm is just a chunk of code, it isn't self-aware, and it doesn't know the difference between the latest football scores vs. a biography of John Wesley. It just sees a bunch of bytes in an HTML stream. I would assume that it also uses checksums to determine if something has changed, which means it doesn't know the difference between a revision that corrects one typo vs. a complete rewrite of a major article.

What's more, it only knows that en.wikipedia.org is a well-linked-to domain, and a heavily-clicked one - it doesn't keep track of wiki categories, or WikiProjects, or individual wiki pages. So all pages on Wikipedia get the benefit of being on Wikipedia, not just the popular ones - and certainly not just the accurate ones.

And there you have it in a nutshell, ladies and gentlemen...?

[A Man In Black]

That's looking at it too simplistically, I'm afraid. The reason there's a problem is because of the snowball effect created by Google's ubiquity in conjunction with WP's high PageRanks. IOW, popularity leads to high PageRanks which increases popularity which further increases PageRanks, ad infinitum.

I know it snowballs, but Wikipedia's initial popularity didn't come from Google; it came from openness in both membership and subject matter. (Becoming Slashdot's latest darling also helped.)

I'm not saying that this openness is entirely a good thing in the abstract, but it has led to Wikipedia becoming popular.

[Somey]

I'm not saying that this openness is entirely a good thing in the abstract, but it has led to Wikipedia becoming popular.

OK... But just so we're clear on this, how are you defining "popularity"? There's Google rankings, Alexa ranking, registered-user counts, number of edits per month, and so forth... Clearly it's popular in all those respects, but in your opinion has the open-editing model led to all of those things, or just one or two in particular?

And just to get back to the original point, I'd say that Sam Vaknin, who is a strident anti-Wikipedian who makes many of us look like lightweights, is mostly concerned with Google rankings - and I'd have to say that most PR and advertising people are mostly concerned with that too. Big Money types want a certain number of eyeballs on a specific page (or piece of content); they don't care about how well the site does overall, especially if they can't buy banner ads on it. And Google rankings, despite being hugely flawed at a conceptual level, are unfortunately one of the most easily-checked and easily-understood measurements in existence. The others, ehhh... maybe not so easy.

[GoodFaith]

Wikipedia's success is solely due to hitting the PageRank jackpot. If Everything2 or Citizendium had won, things would be different.

I'm not up on all the conspiracy theories, so you'll have to bear with me.

PageRank is not a conspiracy theory. Wikipedia was in the right place at the right time, with the right keywords. That's all it is. Wikipedia, Amazon and various price searches clog the upper ranks.

Wikipedia has managed to have a lot of users (and thus a lot of content) because they'll take literally everyone.

So does Blogger. Why are you defending Wikipedia, anyway?

People tend to defend and promote things they feel they own, and there's no way to promote ownership more than by making someone a part of making something.

That's just the problem. Nobody WP:OWNs anything, You're not even allowed to receive private messages within the site!

Britannica has survived since 1768 with zero volunteers.

Dissimilar case. Britannica isn't a volunteer project, and it rests as much on the authority of its authors (who are typically respected in their respective fields) as on the authority of its sources.

A volunteer project is not necessarily a good thing. The writing is at best choppy. The copyediting is non-existent. The fact-checking is downright negligent. The people running the joint are lonely adolescents. And the so-called ":founder" is dot-com roadkill and a card-carrying kook.

Either Wikipedia is a reference work or it isn't. If it is, treat it like a real publication. If it isn't, dump it into Usenet.