Wiki

From Cyberlaw: Difficult Issues Winter 2010
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Full Draft of Memo on DropIO


BIRTH & GROWTH OF WIKIPEDIA

Wikipedia was formally launched on January 15, 2001, by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger.[1] It represented a new development in the collaborative, web-based creation of bodies of knowledge. Initially it was a complement to the expert-written encyclopedia project “Nupedia,”[2] in order to provide an additional source of articles. Wikipedia soon outpaced Nupedia and grew to be arguably the most successful example of collaborative content creation. Today Wikipedia boasts that it contains several million articles and pages in hundreds of languages worldwide contributed by millions of users.

Wikipedia is arguably the most successful online collaboration but it is not the first. One early predecessor was Interpedia, initiated in 1993,[3] although the project never fully left the planning stages.[4] Free Software Foundation’s Richard Stallman described the need for a free universal encyclopedia in 1999, although the Free Software Foundation didn’t launch its GNUPedia to compete with Nupedia until January 17, 2001, two days after the start of Wikipedia.[5] And Wikipedia itself grew out of Nupedia, an online collaborative encyclopedia. On January 10, 2001, Wales and Sanger created the first Nupedia wiki, but reputedly Nupedia’s expert volunteers did not want to participate, so Wikipedia was established as a separate site.[1] Wikipedia’s vision: Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. That’s our commitment.[6]

Growth of Wikipedia

The growth of Wikipedia depended on the contribution of numerous lay users, a departure from the Nupedia tradition of using expert contributors. Nupedia was founded upon the use of highly qualified expert contributors and a multi-step peer review process, but despite its interested editors, the process was slow, and only 12 articles were written in the first year.[7] Wikipedia, in contrast, generated over 1,000 articles in its first month of operation and over 20,000 articles in its first year—a rate of 1,500 articles per month.[1] In September, 2001, Wikipedia expanded into multilingual sites, beginning the development of Wikipedias for all major languages.

Wikimedia

Initially, Wikipedia was managed by Bomis, an organization headed by Jimmy Wales. In March 2002, during the dot-com bust, Bomis withdrew funding for Wikipedia.[8] At that time, Larry Sanger left both Nupedia and Wikipedia. He returned briefly to academia, then joined the Digital Universe Foundation and founded Citizendium, an alternative open encyclopedia that uses real names for contributors to discourage vandalism and expert guidance to ensure accuracy of information.[9]

Meanwhile, Jimmy Wales created the Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit charitable organization head-quartered in San Francisco, CA.[6] Wikimedia was announced on June 20, 2003. Wikimedia serves as an umbrella body that includes several other types of wiki collaborative information sharing sites:

The foundation's by-laws declare a statement of purpose of collecting and developing educational content and to disseminate it effectively and globally.[10] Wikimedia is managed by a Board of Trustees. The Foundation’s board also organizes Wikimania every year, a conference for users of the Wikimedia Foundation projects.

ACADEMIC STUDIES OF WIKIPEDIA

Academic studies of Wikipedia have mainly used Wikipedia as a tool to analyze other phenomenon. The users on Wikipedia provide a large database of subjects which the researchers use to test their hypotheses or as a social network which can be manipulated and observed. The majority of studies focus on either semantic relatedness [11] or online coordination and conflict resolution techniques.[12]

DIFFICULT PROBLEMS

Following Wikimania 2009, the Wikimedia Foundation created a strategy page that identifies major concerns for the future of Wikimedia and permits users to contribute and comment on proposed solutions. The problems presented below have been highlighted as the most significant and challenging problems facing Wikimedia.

Identity & Growth of the Contributing Community

There are three main concerns relating to the contributing community that sustains Wikipedia:

  1. Size of the contributing community – is it sustainable and is it sufficient?
  2. Identity of the contributing community – does population bias create content bias?
  3. Inequality within contributing community – does Wikipedia really represent contributions of the many, or is it moving towards an elite system?

Size:

Several studies and articles have suggested that Wikipedia's contributing community has slowed growth, stopped growing, or is even declining (see :Battle for Wikipedia's Soul"; "Slowing Growth of Wikipedia"; "Volunteers Log Off as Wikipedia Ages" for a sample). Others, such as Oded Nov, have looked at "What Motivates Wikipedians" and concluded that the majority are motivated by fun. But is Wikipedia "fun" enough to maintain it's contributing community? A study by the Palo Alto Research Centre found that the number of new articles added per month flatlined at 60,000 in 2006 and has since declined by a third. Wikimedia Australia's Vice-President, Liam Wyatt explains this: "Because the project is much more filled out and more complete, it's increasingly harder for new users to be able to add something without some level of expertise."

Identity & Bias:

Studies on Wikipedia's contributing population determine that the majority are white males (Oded Nov says 92.7% male, another 87%). If this is the case, does Wikipedia truly represent an unbiased cross-section of global (or even American) knowledge? How does the identity of the contributing community bias Wikipedia regarding politics? Consider claims that Wikipedia needs to be further censored or is being manipulated by Nazis seeking to control the flow of information in Germany.

Inequality:

Within the Wikipedia contributing community, there has been a rapid divide between "contributors" and "editors", with editors determining much of the style, tone and occasionally content of articles. One study found that “elite users” were pushing out new contributors, with 25% of occasional wiki editors’ changes being erased or reverted by established editors. This was up from 10% in 2003. See here.


Quality Control - Perceived and Actual

It is important to distinguish between concerns about the actual quality of Wikipedia articles and concerns about the perceived quality of the articles. The one should be approached as a contributor and technical problem and the other should be addressed as a publicity problem. Also, the concept of quality is intentionally broad and includes everything from accuracy of information to degree of citation provided to the quality of images and prose.

Perceived Quality of Wikipedia

Whether or not Wikipedia actually is accurate, its reception as a trusted source has been plagued by doubts regarding the trustworthiness of its content as the product of mass collaboration by anonymous authors.

The perception of Wikipedia in the average population is relatively high. In a web-based survey conducted in spring 2006, fifty participants rated Wikipedia articles: 76% agreed that the article was accurate, and 46% agreed it was complete. The same survey compared Wikipedia to Encyclopedia Britannica: of 18 responses, 6 favored Britannica, 7 favored Wikipedia, and 11 found Wikipedia more complete.[13]


Reception by Academia

Actual Quality of Wikipedia

On October 24, 2005, The Guardian published an article entitled "Can you trust Wikipedia?" where a panel of experts were asked to critically review seven entries related to their fields.[14] One article was deemed to have made "every value judgement... wrong", the others receiving marks from 5 to 8 out of a notional ten. Of the other six articles reviewed and critiqued, the most common criticisms were:

  1. Poor prose, or ease-of-reading issues (3 mentions)
  2. Omissions or inaccuracies, often small but including key omissions in some articles (3 mentions)
  3. Poor balance, with less important areas being given more attention and vice versa (1 mention)

The most common praises were:

  1. Factually sound and correct, no glaring inaccuracies (4 mentions)
  2. Much useful information, including well selected links, making it possible to "access much information quickly" (3 mentions)

Nature reported in 2005 that science articles in Wikipedia were comparable in accuracy to those on Encyclopedia Britannica's web site. Out of 42 articles, only 4 serious errors were found in Wikipedia, and 4 in Encyclopedia Britannica, although more than a hundred lesser errors and omissions were found in each and Wikipedia's articles were often "poorly structured."[15]

On March 24, 2006, Britannica provided a rebuttal of this article, labeling it "fatally flawed",[16] to which Nature responded.[17] Among Britannica's criticisms were that excerpts rather than the full texts of some of their articles were used, that Nature composited parts of different Britannica texts to make a text for review in one case, that Nature did not check the factual assertions of its reviewers, and that many points which the reviewers labeled as errors were differences of editorial opinion. Nature responded that any errors on the part of its reviewers were not biased in favor of either encyclopedia, that in some cases it used excerpts of articles from both encyclopedias, and that Britannica did not share particular concerns with Nature before publishing its "open letter" rebuttal.

Three subsequent studies--a 2006 web-based survey,[18] a 2004 comparison by c't of Brockhaus Multimedial, Microsoft Encarta, and the German Wikipedia, [19] (repeated in 2007 [20]), and a 2007 review by Australian magazine PC Authority[21]--concluded that Wikipedia was generally as reliable as other traditional Encyclopedias.

However, Wikipedia may not be as reliable in technical or specialized fields. A peer-reviewed 2008 study[22] examined 80 Wikipedia drug entries. The research team from Nova Southeastern University found few factual errors in this set of articles, but determined that these articles were often missing important information, like contraindications and drug interactions. One of the researchers noted that "If people went and used this as a sole or authoritative source without contacting a health professional...those are the types of negative impacts that can occur." The researchers also compared Wikipedia to Medscape Drug Reference (MDR), by looking for answers to 80 different questions covering eight categories of drug information, including adverse drug events, dosages, and mechanism of action. They have determined that MDR provided answers to 82.5 percent of the questions, while Wikipedia could only answer 40 percent, and that answers were less likely to be complete for Wikipedia as well. None of the answers from Wikipedia were determined factually inaccurate, while they found four inaccurate answers in MDR. But the researchers found 48 errors of omission in the Wikipedia entries, compared to 14 for MDR. The lead investigator concluded: "I think that these errors of omission can be just as dangerous [as inaccuracies]", and he pointed out that drug company representatives have been caught deleting information from Wikipedia entries that make their drugs look unsafe.


Regardless of whether Wikipedia is currently accurate or not, there is always room for improvement. The actual quality of articles on Wikipedia includes several concerns:

  1. Accuracy of information
    1. Information citation loops
    2. Vandalism
  2. Anonymity of authors
    1. Credential verification – Essjay controversy
    2. Potential solutions (reputation ranking)
  3. Content coverage – biased towards popular news events
  4. Political bias / balance of articles
  5. Quality of prose & presentation

These will each be addressed below with potential solutions for each section.


Sustainability of Wikimedia Model

Technologically

  • Technologically: how have a platform that both supports the numerous users who regularly access Wikimedia and still serves the less tech savvy contributor base
  • lack of features can in itself be a feature


Organizationally

  • Organizationally: financial sustainability and organizational models raise concerns about generating a renewable and reliable source of revenue and how to adapt to different roles in the future
  • If the number of administrators, retaining a certain degree of institutional authority, continues to grow over time, will a new complexity make it necessary to increase the number of hierarchical layers in the structure and discourage participation? This issue will need to be resolved at some point in the future.

Emerging Strategic Priorities in this area include:

    • Optimize Wikimedia’s operations
    • Identify roles volunteers are best suited to perform and what are the most effective uses of paid staff
    • Create alliances and partnerships with other institutions and organizations to advance the mission: also, what are the necessary preconditions to such alliances? How support similar projects?


Expansion & Questions of Scope

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 [1],History of Wikipedia. Cite error: Invalid <ref> tag; name "History of Wikipedia" defined multiple times with different content Cite error: Invalid <ref> tag; name "History of Wikipedia" defined multiple times with different content
  2. ↑ [2], Wikipedia Entry on Nupedia.
  3. ↑ [3], Wikipedia Entry on Interpedia
  4. ↑ [4], Joseph Reagle Article on Interpedia & Wikipedia Background.
  5. ↑ [5],The Free Universal Encyclopedia and Learning Resource.
  6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 [6], Wikimedia Foundation Cite error: Invalid <ref> tag; name "Wikimedia Foundation" defined multiple times with different content
  7. ↑ [7], The Early History of Nupedia and Wikipedia: A Memoir - Part I" and "Part II", Slashdot, April 2005.
  8. ↑ [8].(July 31, 2006). Schiff, Stacy. "Know It All". The New Yorker.
  9. ↑ [9], Anderson, Nate (February 25, 2007). "Citizendium: building a better Wikipedia". Ars Technica.
  10. ↑ [10], Wikimedia Foundation bylaws. Archived from the original on 2007-04-20.
  11. ↑ [11], M Strube et al, WikiRelate! Computer Semantic Relatedness Using Wikipedia, Proceedings of the National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (2006); E Gabrilovich et al, Computing Semantic Relatedness Using Wikipedia-Based Explicit Semantic Analysis(2007) ; Zesch et al, Analyzing and Accessing WIkipedia as a Lexical Semantic Resource, Data Structures for Linguistic Resources (2007).
  12. ↑ [12],Viegas et al, Talk Before You Type: Coordination in Wikipedia, Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (2007); Kittur et al, He Says, She Says; Conflict and Coordination in Wikipedia, Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Computing (2007) ; D Wilkonson & B Huberman, Assessing the Value of Cooperation in Wikipedia, Computers and Society, arXiv:cs/0702140v1 [cs.DL] (2007).
  13. ↑ Larry Press, "Survey of Wikipedia accuracy and completeness," Professor of Computer Information Systems, California State University (2006).
  14. ↑ Template:Citeweb
  15. ↑ Cite error: Invalid <ref> tag; no text was provided for refs named GilesJ2005Internet
  16. ↑ Template:Cite news
  17. ↑ Template:Cite web
  18. ↑ Template:Cite web
  19. ↑ Michael Kurzidim: Wissenswettstreit. Die kostenlose Wikipedia tritt gegen die Marktführer Encarta und Brockhaus an, in: c't 21/2004, October 4, 2004, S. 132-139.
  20. ↑ Dorothee Wiegand: "Entdeckungsreise. Digitale Enzyklopädien erklären die Welt." c't 6/2007, March 5, 2007, p. 136-145. Original quote: "Wir haben in den Texten der freien Enzyklopädie nicht mehr Fehler gefunden als in denen der kommerziellen Konkurrenz"
  21. ↑ Template:Cite web
  22. ↑ Template:Cite journal accessed 25 Sept 09
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