Know It All

It’s ironic how, although there is no assurance the information in Wikipedia’s articles are accurate,  Wikipedia “is now the seventeenth-most-popular site on the Internet, generating more traffic daily than MSNBC.com and the online versions of the Times and the Wall Street Journal combined” (Schiff, paragraph 2). What makes it even more interesting is that there had already been a failed attempt by “a devious Frenchman, Pierre Bayle, to conceive of an encyclopedia composed solely of errors” (Schiff, paragraph 6). Although Wikipedia may not be full of errors, it is still not a reliable source to use. As “the facts may [emphasis added] be sturdy,” it can be difficult to distinguish fact from fiction.

Schiff has a good point about traditional encyclopedias only covering a narrow range of topics. Wikipedia is good in that it has articles on nearly every topic that can be written about. However, just because Wikipedia has articles on all of those subjects doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re accurate. Since “anyone with Internet access can create a Wikipedia entry or edit an existing one,” the entries may contain false information (Schiff, paragraph 3). While “there is no question that Wikipedia beats every other source when it comes to breadth, efficiency, and accessibility,” “‘We can get the wrong answer to a question quicker than our fathers and mothers could find a pencil’” (Schiff, paragraph 30). Therefore, it doesn’t do much good for Wikipedia to cover a broad number of topics when the information won’t necessarily be correct.

I also found it interesting what Jimmy Wales, the founder of the Wikimedia Foundation that runs Wikipedia, said about making an entry on Robert Merton and options-pricing theory. “‘They were going to take my essay and send it to two finance professors in the field,’ he recalled. ‘I had been out of academia for several years. It was intimidating; it felt like homework’” (Schiff, paragraph 9). This quote by Wales makes me think about how Wikipedia works and how its articles are posted. While traditional encyclopedias do carry out the research and put in the effort to make sure that their information is correct, some people who create or edit Wikipedia entries don’t necessarily do that. Unfortunately, many people choose to read Wikipedia over traditional encyclopedias, which are more reliable sources of information.

While Wikipedia has taken more measures towards heading off false information, it is hard to imagine that every entry on Wikipedia will get looked over often enough to ensure the information will stay correct. Although “Wikipedia has become a regulatory thicket, complete with an elaborate hierarchy of users and policies about policies,” there are so many entries that, as one entry is corrected, five more will have been changed with incorrect information (Schiff, paragraph 24).