When I discovered Wikipedia I was impressed. I was impressed because I had low expectations. "Look how much these amateurs have accomplished!" I think it's been much the same with other amateur media, like blogs. We first met them with low expectations, thinking amateurs were good for very little, and what impressed us was how unexpectedly good much of their writing was.

And that's when it began to go wrong. The amateurs let ideology + praise go to their heads, and built a mythology of the amateur. Amateurs weren't just capable of professional quality, they were inherently superior to the professionals. They had invented a New Way Of Doing Media. Quality would be an inherent property of amateur media, so just by setting up the right structure, removing the barriers created by the old media, quality would appear by itself.

The idea behind Wikipedia is that knowledge is distributed, and that a user-editable encyclopedia is a good way to harvest that knowledge. It's a good idea, but the reality is that Wikipedia has a large number of structural flaws that make it a secondary resource for people who care about the quality of their knowledge. It's better than Google, but worse than a real encyclopedia.

I decided to give Encyclopædia Britannica a try recently, the online subscription version, ($70 a year). Like the time I discovered Wikipedia, I was impressed, but in a different way. I was not impressed because I had low expectations, I was not impressed like you're impressed when a child surprises you with a half-decent drawing. I was impressed because it's so goddamn good, no excuses or handicaps required. I'd come to rely on Google and Wikipedia for my research, and I'd forgotten what a concise, well written, authoritative introduction to a subject looks like.

I'd gotten used to Wikipedia's endless "critics say .. but defenders say" way of dealing with controversy, where controversy is defined not as "something genuine experts disagree about", but "something there are more than one strong opinion about somewhere". I'd gotten used to Wikipedia's often mediocre and bad writing, produced when hundreds of contributors make tiny changes, but noone thinks about overall structure and presentation. I'd gotten used to Wikipedia's lack of focus, where any fact is equally important, even if they're less essential to understanding the topic.

Here's an example. This is from Britannica's 19 page entry on science fiction:

Science fiction is a modern genre. Though writers in antiquity sometimes dealt with themes common to modern science fiction, their stories made no attempt at scientific and technological plausibility, the feature that distinguishes science fiction from earlier speculative writings and other contemporary speculative genres such as fantasy and horror. The genre formally emerged in the West, where the social transformations wrought by the Industrial Revolution first led writers and intellectuals to extrapolate the future impact of technology. By the beginning of the 20th century, an array of standard science fiction "sets" had developed around certain themes, among them space travel, robots, alien beings, and time travel (see below Major science fiction themes). The customary "theatrics" of science fiction include prophetic warnings, utopian aspirations, elaborate scenarios for entirely imaginary worlds, titanic disasters, strange voyages, and political agitation of many extremist flavours, presented in the form of sermons, meditations, satires, allegories, and parodies - exhibiting every conceivable attitude toward the process of techno-social change, from cynical despair to cosmic bliss.

This is written by someone who knows science fiction, and knows how to write. Now compare that to Wikipedia's entry (at the time of writing). Go on, read it all. Read until your brain hurts and begs for relief.

There are good entries in Wikipedia, but there are also very many bad and mediocre ones. Use the random article viewer to see how many.

Wikipedia is sometimes accused of being factually unreliable, but that depends on the subject. Yes, there are mistakes and explicit untruths in Wikipedia, produced by misunderstanding or vandalism. But obvious mistakes like a wrong date or an event that everyone agrees didn't happen are easy for Wikipedia's army of knowledgeable amateurs to fix. For many subjects there is a gradual slope of reliability up which it is possible to push an article, one fact at a time. Professional encyclopedias like Britannica are at the top of that slope, but Wikipedia is not far behind.

This works when experts and knowledgeable amateurs agree, when there is a broad consensus between everyone who care enough about an article to want to edit it. When they don't, that's just too bad for the experts. As Jason Scott puts it:

This is what the inherent failure of wikipedia is. It's that there's a small set of content generators, a massive amount of wonks and twiddlers, and then a heaping amount of procedural whackjobs. And the mass of twiddlers and procedural whackjobs means that the content generators stop being so and have to become content defenders. Woe be that your take on things is off from the majority. Even if you can prove something, you're now in the situation that anybody can change it. And while that's all great in a happy-go-lucky flower shower sort of way, it's when you realize that the people who are going to change it could have absolutely no experience with the subject whatsoever, then you see where we are.

If you've ever worked in a large company, one where not everyone's name is known by everyone else, you've bumped into these people, who don't know the thing the company makes very well, don't keep on top of new ideas beyond buzzwords, yet wield the kind of power where they can stop and start innovation and positive growth because they simply feel like it. It's pretty heartbreaking stuff and I hope a bunch of you never have to deal with it.

But thanks to Wikipedia, you can experience this on a daily basis! .. It is not hard, browsing over historical edits to majorly contended Wikipedia articles, to see the slow erosion of facts and ideas according to people trying to implement their own idea of neutrality or meaning on top of it. Even if the person who originally wrote a section was well-informed, any huckleberry can wander along and scrawl crayon on it. This does not eventually lead to an improved final entry.

And that brings us back to my main objection to Wikipedia: It's lack of overall quality. By quality I mean writing style, presentation, the ability to present themes and subtleties, the ability to summarize a subject, and give readers an idea of its meaning and relevance. Quality is holistic, it requires understanding. Getting individual facts right isn't good enough. There is no gradual slope of quality as there is with factual accuracy, only a long plain of mediocricity followed by a sharp rise at the end. Britannica is at the top of that rise because it is written by individuals who know how to write, who know their subject, and know how to present it clearly in few words. Wikipedia is at the bottom of the same rise because it is written by committee.

Britannica is consistently good. Wikipedia is good only by accident. Britannica gives experts the freedom to do their job, Wikipedia drowns their experts in tedious committee work.

This is why the standard defense of Wikipedia ("well why don't you just fix it yourself") doesn't cut it. The only way to fix a badly written article is to rewrite it, something the committee cultures that form around popular Wikipedia articles frown upon. To delete a badly written paragraph or remove an unessential fact is seen as vandalism. To insert an analysis that is based on a solid understanding of the subject is to violate neutrality. Without this kind of culture Wikipedia wouldn't work at all, but that doesn't mean it leads to good writing, it just ensure that few articles ever stray far from mediocricity.

The "fix it yourself"-attitude of Wikipedia supporters is also user-unfriendly. Remember what encyclopedias are for. They're a place we go to learn, not to share of our ignorance. What I want from an encyclopedia is condensed understanding, not the opportunity to volunteer for committee work. Wikipedia ideology says that you have no right to complain unless you contribute, but from a non-ideological point of view this is ridiculous. To most of its users, Wikipedia is just another encyclopedia, and unfocused, badly written articles are just that: unfocused and badly written.

The Wikipedia ideology demands that, as an amateur media platform that uses a neat technology to exploit the distributed knowledge of amateurs, it should be given special consideration. It demands to play with a handicap. But when I visit an encyclopedia, I'm not interested in excuses or neat technologies. All I want is to learn.

I don't mean that Wikipedia is worthless. It's a valuable reference work with many strengths. But a near-religious ideology has been built on top of it that demands that it be seen as far more than that. As Nicholas Carr writes, the language of Wikipedia and of the "Web 2.0" movement in general is the language of rapture, built around a Cult of the Amateur.

What we need to relearn, in this time of amateurs and unrestricted information flow, is the value of expertise. Expertise is not limited to specific people or institutions. Professional writers posess it often no more than amateurs. But it exists. Any subject you can think of, a very small number of people know it better than anyone else. Knowledge is elitist. There are such things as true knowledge and false knowledge, and true knowledge is hard to come by. Most of us just don't have it, we guess and we pretend and that's all.

The job of an encyclopedia is not to capture distributed knowledge, but to channel expertise. And you can't do that - Wikipedia clearly shows it - without some way of saying "these people are experts and good writers, they should have more power over this entry than the rest of us".

Wikipedia should perhaps emulate the free software movement. A free software system like Linux is not written by any Joe R. Newbie with a text editor. Linux is controlled by an elite of brilliant hackers. They decide which contributions to accept, and which to reject. They ensure that the whole isn't sacrificed in favor of the parts, and they decide when to rewrite code that has deteriorated in a larger sense than just containing individual bugs. This way of working actually works, and should be emulated by Wikipedia. Let anyone make a contribution, but use experts to guard the gates.

As it is today, Wikipedia forms the middle tier of a pyramid of reference works. The top of this pyramid is made of professional encyclopedias. The professionals cover few subjects, but what they cover they cover well. The amateurs on the middle tier cover more subjects, but clumsily. The robots on the bottom tier, the search engines, cover nearly everything, but poorly.

If you want to learn about a new subject, the first place to look should always be a professional encyclopedia, like Britannica. There is no reason to begin looking anywhere else. If the professional encyclopedias don't have what you need, (and they often won't), try Wikipedia, and failing that, Google. Wikipedia isn't a good encyclopedia, but it is written by knowledgeable amateurs. Google is just dumb, mechanical PageRank, impressive enough as technology, but the last place you want to begin your research.

Quality matters, expertise matters, and there's no automagic to it: We have to seek it out, not rely on the internet to hand it to us.

(Update: For further reading, see below.)

Wikipedia covers most of my needs. When visiting you, and searching for subjects that interested me in Britannica, I found that most things I wanted to read about ... simply wasn't covered at all.

Britannica may have a few well written articles. The problem is quite simply that there is so *few* of them - and nearly none of those that interest me are there. Why should I pay $70 for something that is well written but so woefully lacking in content?

Furthermore, while you may trust the Britannica brand as high quality of information - I put more trust into the talk pages + history pages of wikipedia. If there is something I do not understand in a wikipedia article, I can ask in the talk pages to get it clarified. Is that possible through Britannica?

Rune-Kristian Viken: When visiting you, and searching for subjects that interested me in Britannica, I found that most things I wanted to read about ... simply wasn't covered at all.

What you did was search for specialized subjects in fields you already know very well. But let's say you want to investigate a field you don't know much about. Where do you begin? What you want, or at least what I want, is an overview that points me towards the specifics of the subject and explain how these specifics are related. For instance, if you don't know much about computers, this 100 part entry in Britannica would be a very good place to start - and this isn't kids' stuff, they begin by explaining the halting problem.

After you've read that, you might want to know more, some of which you'll find in Britannica, and some of which you'll find only in Wikipedia. At some point encyclopedias are of no more use to you, and you need to read books. If you want to know computers well you have to read books, because that's not what encyclopedias are for, they're for providing overviews. And Britannica simply has better overviews than Wikipedia - and fewer, which may or may not matter depending on how specialized your interest is.

So you won't find articles about bash in Britannica. There isn't room. But someone might put together a professional encyclopedia of computing or technology, where there would be room for such things, and that encyclopedia would again have a higher potential quality than Wikipedia. So this isn't about Britannica, it's about professional encyclopedias in general. Paid individual experts simply write better - much better - than unpaid committees of amateurs.

Btw, for more about Wikipedia, amateur media and information quality, (it's all connected), here are some of the articles I link to in this entry, and some I didn't find room for.

Andrew Orlowski, The Register:
- Wikipedia 'to make universities obsolete'
- Wikipedia's Emergent Readers fail to impress readers
- Wikipedia founder admits to serious quality problems
- Wikipedia: Magic, monkeys and typewriters
- Why Wikipedia isn't like Linux

Nicholas Carr:
- The amorality of Web 2.0
- Trouble in Wiki land
- The law of the wiki

Jason Scott:
- The Great Failure of Wikipedia
- A Criticism of Wikipedia Now Exceeding A Screem

Robert McHenry:
- The Faith-Based Encyclopedia
- On Getting It: The Faith-Based Encyclopedia And Me
- The Education of Gesture
- Yakketi-Yak (Everybody Talk Back)
- What Do You Want To Know?

McHenry's articles are especially recommended. I hadn't read him when I wrote the two earlier posts, but his "McHenry's Second Law" sums up everything I've been trying to say:

The flow of "information" expands to fill any available channel, while actual knowledge remains scarce and available only to those willing to work at it.

Bjørn Stærk, you seem to be degrading into a defender of the politically correct main stream veiws. Maybe it is because of the Dagblad parties and your new friends there, I don't know. But it's sad. You are going into spin, soon to hit the ground. A year ago it was interesting coming here, now you have turned irrelevant.

oldgoat: A year ago it was interesting coming here, now you have turned irrelevant.

I'm very sorry to hear that, my dear unknown pseudonymous reader. I've never seen you before, and yet I miss you already. As we part ways, I will refrain from speculating about which particular web community's standards you're judging me by, and just congratulate you on your sturdy mental defenses. They will certainly serve you well in life.

One of the good things with blogs is the swarm of voices, but I see a lot of problems with compressing a lot of knowledge into one encyclopedia-article. I only trust Wikipedia on information I already knows someting about. For new areas I check against professional encyclopedias.

Strangely enough the view of neutrality that is used in Wikipedia is very similar to the one in mainstream media: By referring two different viewpoints one demonstrate objectivity. I am very tired of this 'nothing and everything is true'-way of thinking. Blogs are interesting because they have a viewpoint. That is why I think some of the philosophy behind the swarm is always correct seems a little yesterday to me. Not old-fashined, but perhaps a different paradigm then open source and blogging.

But Rune-Kristian is correct about a lot of information in Wikipedia is difficult to get in professional sources. Both in history and popular culture they have had articels about subjects that it has been difficult to find other places.

Wikipedia is an impressive and useful project, but some of its supporters try to give it a role it will be unable to fulfill.

De nye encyclopediene blir liksom de frie mediers siste utpost? Eller blir det bloggene? Haha! SVs Røde Surfebrett kaller deg Norges mest produktive blogger og jammen tror jeg ikke de ha rett! Men bloggen din er fin, oversiktlig og innholdsrik!

Føl deg for øvrig fri til å linke til http://www.tumleplassen.blogspot.com

Tor Andre: Blogs are interesting because they have a viewpoint.

Right, but is "interesting" all there is? It's better to have a viewpoint than to be neutral, but it's also better to reach towards objectivity than to merely have a viewpoint. Opinions are cheap, they easily expand to fill all available bandwith. I don't see much charm in opinions any more, and, sadly, the most interesting opinions are often the least reliable. Fiction is always more interesting than reality, so to make reality interesting it is popular to fictionalize it.

This is a pervasive problem. I won't say it's acute, but it's annoying, and the internet is feeding it. The internet makes it easier for people to form their own bubble realities. I'm not saying the solution lies outside the internet, (the traditional media has its own problems), only that we have to be aware that there is a problem and that "interesting viewpoints" won't help us solve it.

Dette er typisk. En samfunnsviter som tror at fordi det er kaos på hans fagområde, må det være kaos på andres også.

Jeg har vært inne å hentet mye informasjon av mere teknisk art fra flere 'ideelle' informasjonskanaler, og den er stort sett riktig. (du kan prøve selv: mysql, PPPoE, DNA, mitochondrion f.eks.)

Innenfor samfunnsfagene kan man IKKE enes om hva som er kunnskap og fakta. (De mest ekstreme benekter at noe som helst kan være sant)
Resultatet blir at makt er rett, hvilket vi ser på wikipedia i dag, og forsåvidt i denne bloggen.

Trodde virkelig Bjørn Stark at man skulle kunne finne absolutt korrekte artikler om kontroversielle spørsmål i Wikipedia, eller var det bare viktigper som var ute på farten?

"Wikipedia should perhaps emulate the free software movement. A free software system like Linux is not written by any Joe R. Newbie with a text editor. Linux is controlled by an elite of brilliant hackers."

Dette er ikke riktig, og dette er ikke ditt fagfelt. Prøv Wikipedia om Linux før du hevder noe slik. Eller hva med å lære seg Linux?

Please write in English so others can follow the discussion.

My main objection to Wikipedia isn't the quality of the individual facts, but the quality of the writing. This isn't just a matter of superficial polish, you need good writing to convey ideas clearly. Good writing means placing focus where it belongs, it means having a good overall structure to the information. Wikipedia fails at this. It's reasonable good at collecting individual facts in one place, but rarely good at presenting them well.

As for Linux, computers is my profession, but that doesn't mean I know how the kernel team works. So explain to me, how would you go about to make a change to the Linux kernel?

Hei!

Utrolig kuli at du har hevet deg på disse-Wikipedia bølgen. Enhver blågger med et ønske om respect i blåggosfæren må skrive minst ett innlegg hvor man disser Wikipedia.

"If you want to learn about a new subject, the first place to look should always be a professional encyclopedia, like Britannica."

Ja, "profesjonelle encyclopedier" er absolutt det første stedet man burde starte, uansett hvilket emne man ønsker å lære noe om. Takk for dette gode rådet. La meg legge til at nest etter "profesjonelle encyclopedier" er artikkeldatabasene til de profesjonelle avisene VG og Dagbladet gullgruver av kunnskap og visdom. Det er viktig i den digitale alderen hvor alle kan være innholdsleverandører at vi opprettholder, ikke undergraver, autoriteten til de profesjonelle innholdsleverandørene.

Det var synd at du ikke nevnte eller håttlinka Larry Sanger og hans kritikk av WP, det ville gitt deg enda mere blåggocred.

Esel Svak: Det var synd at du ikke nevnte eller håttlinka Larry Sanger og hans kritikk av WP, det ville gitt deg enda mere blåggocred.

Thanks for the tip, here it is. Sanger's point about lack of respect for expertise is a good one. As for the media, (professional and amateur), they're far less reliable than Wikipedia. Wikipedia is not unreliable as such, it's just less reliable than it might have been without its anti-elitism, as well as unfocused and badly written. But I'll take Wikipedia over VG and Dagbladet any day.

To improve Wikipedia to make use of a contributor's expertise on a certain subject they would have to categorize entries to a much further degree of definition than is currently done. Can you imagine the committee brawls that would spawn?

Tal Rotbart: Can you imagine the committee brawls that would spawn?

Perhaps. And that is why we need professional encyclopedias. To paraphrase Jesus, encyclopedias were made for man, not man for the encyclopedias.

There is an interesting literature on the wisdom of crowds - how large numbers of, say, economic traders collectively manage to make use of all the decentralized information among them. Since Wikipedia is, as I understand it, not subject to what economists would call barriers to entry, it is in principle subject to the same principle. For a single topic, more contributors should yield better (in the writing sense and the truth sense) results.

But the wisdom-of-crowds argument depends critically on competition - better products and better entrepreneurial guesses intrinsically triumph over worse ones. I don't really see that in Wikipedia. The only margins of competition are how much free time people have to amend old entries and how devoted they are to the entry reading a particular way. Neither of these margins, it seems to me, is likely to promote a closer approximation to the truth (or better writing, for that matter).

Bjørn writes:

"Wikipedia should perhaps emulate the free software movement. A free software system like Linux is not written by any Joe R. Newbie with a text editor. Linux is controlled by an elite of brilliant hackers."

Sturla answers (translated):

"This is not correct, and this is not your area of expertize. Try Wikipedia on Linux before you claim such things. Or why not try to learn Linux?"

For your information, Sturla, Bjørn used to run Gentoo on his laptop (but the bastard switched bad to the windows running dark side. I'll never forgive you for that, Bjørn! .. or maybe I will :-). Furthermore, you are wrong. Linux *is* controlled by an elite of brilliant hackers - at least the kernel is. If you try to follow kernel traffic you'll see that they are brilliant.

I find it funny that you call Bjørn a "samfunnsviter". He's not. He's a computer programmer working for one of the larger software companies of norway. I, by the way, admin *nix servers for a living.

Back to linux. If you take a look at the development process you'll see that the kernel hackers are mostly employed by large companies, and that they're extremely good at what they do. They work for companies/organizations such as IBM, RedHat, Ubuntu, NASA, NSA and so forth.

Of course, linux is more than just the kernel - I hear you claim. That depends on definition. A linux distro typically includes loads upon loads of utilities. Which may or may not be developed by professionals. You'll come across software such as KDE which is written by both experts and amateurs. You'll come accross OpenOffice - a bloated piece of shit - which are developed by mostly professionals. You'll come across incredible amounts of different software - developed by various guys.

Anyways. It's not so that everyone can participate in the free software movement - as they _can_ with wikipedia. cvs access for most projects (or git access for the kernel) is given out to those that have proven themselves. With wikipedia, anyone can patch an article. With Linux - Linus have to pour the holy penguin pee on the code.

I, however, appreciates wikipedia. I would also love an approach with moderators or 'maintainers' of various branches - who would have to approve patches to the articles.

The best article that I have ever read that weighs the pros and cons of both Wikipedia AND Britannica was The Book Stops Here on Wired

"(...) true knowledge is hard to come by. Most of us just don't have it, we guess and we pretend and that's all."

Ah, but what if nobody has true knowledge, and everybody pretend and that's all, the only ones seeming to possess true knowledge being those who are the best pretenders.

The thing is, the Wikipedia article on sci-fi,will probably have links to a hundred more specialized articles on topics like too esoteric to have made their way into Britannica. (For example, and this is kind of surprising to me, Britannica doesn't seem to have an article about Orson Scott Card, but that could just be because I'm not a member or something). Anyway, that's one of the main advantages of Wikipedia, I think -- all the random articles on extremely current and highly specialized aspects of pop-culture that are entertaining to browse through on the dead of night.

But you're dead-on about it being a middle-tier place to start researching.

er, in the dead of night that is.

[news.com] Study: Wikipedia as accurate as Britannica

The journal Nature says the open-access encyclopedia is about as good a source of accurate information as Britannica, the venerable standard-bearer of facts about the world around us, according to a study published this week in the journal Nature.

http://news.com.com/Study+Wikipedia+as+accurate+as+Britannica/2100-1038_3-5997332.html?tag=nefd.top

Torkil Bruland: The journal Nature says the open-access encyclopedia is about as good a source of accurate information as Britannica

.. as accurate, or close enough, but as good? They also said this:

"Nature said its reviewers found that Wikipedia entries were often poorly structured and confused."

Like I said, the quality of the writing is my main problem with Wikipedia.

Wikipedia's weakness is also its strength.

By its very nature, Wikipedia encourages you to look deeper into the matter you are investigating. What you are reading *could* be false, so try to verify it. Use Wikipedia as a starting point.

Read any newspaper article on a subject you know a lot about, and you will probably notice that the journalist is clueless and most likely spreading misinformation to boot. Over-simplifying, excluding important details, and so on, are extremely common. Does EB do the same? Maybe, maybe not, but the thing is that EB is an "authoritative source". You do not question it.

This, to me, is a major flaw.

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Secular Blasphemy: Science accuracy: Wikipedia vs Britannica, December 16, 2005 05:05 AM