I drew a range of reactions with my recent post “A World Without Wikipedia: Not Such a Bad Idea,” in which I said “I don’t know a single serious researcher who considers it anything other than a joke.”
That isn’t precisely true. Most of the scholars, historians and academics I have met do think Wikipedia is a joke — except for the ones who find it an incredibly frustrating cesspool of misinformation. And I don’t know of any college professors who allow students to use it in term papers. That should tell you something about the caliber of its information. In fact, I recently had a conversation with Suzanne Stone, senior researcher for “Jeopardy,” and she, too, said Wikipedia is literally not ready for prime time. (And for the record, the L.A. Daily Mirror is designated a Wikipedia-free zone).
Despite the hype, and its top ranking in Google search results, Wikipedia is nothing more than the fan boys’ brain dump: a magnet for coding tweakers, factoid zealots and crackpots. No detail is too trivial to be overlooked — or to ignite a flame war.
To be sure, Wikipedia has its uses. If you want to know “When was the War of 1812?” or “What color was the old gray mare?” you’ll find an answer that has a 99% probability of being accurate.
And then there’s the entry on the benefits of tin foil hats.
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Here’s my own experience:
I was an early adopter of Wikipedia in its idealistic infancy and contributed several dozen entries. A few fragments have somehow survived, at least they were still there the last time I checked, although they were barely recognizable.
One of these entries involved the well-known (at least in Los Angeles) street Normandie Avenue, a north-south artery that figured in the Los Angeles Riots, when truck driver Reginald Denny was beaten at Florence Avenue and Normandie.
Within hours of writing “Normandie Avenue,” some Wikipediot had changed it to “Normandy Avenue.” I went through the entry’s history, tracked down the culprit (who did not live in Los Angeles and was utterly unfamiliar with the city) and wrote a nasty email saying that “mistakes are bad and ought to be taken out of Wikipedia rather than put in.”
His defense was that fixing entries was his hobby and that Normandie “looked wrong.” Did he check first? Of course not! Welcome to Twikipedia, where items can be corrected and then UN-corrected again and again.
Veteran Wiki contributors will know that being uncivil (i.e. snotty) to other Wikians is a violation of what is laughingly referred to as the “rules of behavior.” Wiki writers are supposed so use netiquette with one another. And of course, nobody takes that rule seriously. I had already learned, even then, that the only way people pay attention to you on Wikipedia is if you hit them with a brick — as hard as possible.
In truth, freed from the social inhibitions of dealing face to face, Wiki contributors engage in name-calling worthy of an elementary school playground and wage malicious “revert wars” in which the offending entry is returned to a previous version, back and forth until a babysitter locks the entry and ends the tantrum.
And then there are the times when some kid will blank an entry and replace a day’s work with “JASON IS GAY HA HA.”
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But there’s a much larger flaw that’s obscured by all the infantile fury.
By itself, “Normandie vs. Normandy” is a trivial issue that was easily (and permanently, I hope) corrected. Multiply “Normandie vs. Normandy” by 3.8 million articles and the problem takes on a much greater magnitude.
And here’s where Wikipedia goes off the rails. It is, to be sure, an idealistic — even Utopian — concept: That informed people around the world can pool their expertise and create a free, online encyclopedia.
That, at least, is the theory. Unfortunately, Wiki has become something far different and falls far, far short of the ideal, and for this we have to blame human nature, which drags Wikipedia down to the lowest common denominator, where it rests on the ocean floor next to the Titanic.
In practice, Wiki has evolved to embrace the concept that truth is a democracy and facts can be put to a popular vote. All writers are equal and all statements, even those diametrically opposed to one another, are equally valid. In the world of Wiki, “Normandie” can be “Normandy” — and should be “Normandy” — if it “looks right.”
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My biggest and most prolonged Wiki battle was over the Black Dahlia case, a fight that eventually convinced me to abandon the entry — and Wikipedia. Having spent years tracking down the 1947 news stories, examining public records and interviewing original participants, I considered myself able to write a concise entry summarizing the known details and eliminating (or so I foolishly assumed) the nonsense put forth by several books on the case.
Silly me.
One of the raging battles in the early days of the Black Dahlia entry dealt with whether it should be titled “Black Dahlia” or “The Black Dahlia,” a burning issue that sailed back and forth like a Ping-Pong ball among the BD and TBD factions. The fight over what appeared to be an incredibly inconsequential matter was an omen of the culture of Wikitopia: There is no hair so fine that it can’t be split – and it’s a hair trigger on a flame war.
For a time, the Black Dahlia entry stayed relatively unchanged as I attempted to deflate the more elementary published errors, like weeding a garden every day – or every hour. But soon enough, I ran into the trolls who had adopted the page.
One of the more common mistakes about the Black Dahlia case is that the victim was named Elizabeth Ann Short. This error can be traced to the introduction to a March 28, 1971, article in the Los Angeles Times titled “Farewell, My Black Dahlia” and has gone viral, even appearing in the FBI file, giving the mistake an air of authority. In truth, her name was Elizabeth Short. As her mother testified under oath at the inquest: She had no middle name.
Time and again, the corrected entry was deleted and the incorrect middle name was restored (welcome to the “revert wars.”) To settle the question once and for all, I uploaded a scan of the inquest page giving Phoebe Short’s testimony. Understand that under California law, this is a public record. This time, the trolls decided that I had violated Wiki’s copyright rules and continually deleted the scan. Besides, who could verify that it was a scan of a real document and not some fabricated nonsense, ala Donald Wolfe?
Ignorance 1, Sanity 0.
As I said, the only thing more amusing than citizen journalists is citizen scholars.
And so I gave up on Wikipedia, abandoning the Black Dahlia entry to all the trolls who lurk under the information highway. There are legions of them, with apparently nothing else to do with their lives but destroy a day’s work in a matter of minutes with a revert, all the while braying about their superior knowledge and insistence on “neutral POV (point of view).”
I concede that Wikipedia has its uses, such as a quick reference to the score of the 1939 Blue-Gray Game. And it offers amusement, like the aesthetics of Ernie Bushmiller’s “Nancy” and a biography of Vanilla Ice.
Did I mention the entry on tin foil hats?
The notion that a tin foil hat can significantly reduce the intensity of incident radio frequency radiation on the wearer’s brain has some scientific validity, as the effect of strong radio waves has been documented for quite some time.
You won’t find that in the Britannica.
To date, there’s nothing about “A World Without Wikipedia,” but I’m hopeful someone from the tin foil hat crowd will get one started. That’s one entry I look forward to reading.
ladailymirror.com 
I consider Wikipedia to be a fascinating message board, but that’s all. I do use it to link to newspaper articles and other, better-researched, websites, and as a heads-up for who may (or may not) have died that day, so it is useful for that.
But I have looked at the Wikipedia entries for all the people I have written biographies of, and there are errors in all of them. Mostly minor errors, but still. “Why not go in and correct them?” I am asked. Well, it is not my job to correct everything on the Internet (and if it were, I would start with IMDB!). Besides, I am told that five minutes later, one’s corrections will be uncorrected, anyway.
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I never use it when I’m researching my posts, I just go to original sources and documentation.
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I can relate, believe me. I went through much the same thing with some of the Edgar Allan Poe-related entries. Another losing battle.
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I use Wiki solely as a jumping-off point. I can usually glean enough basic info to enable me to search further.
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A great post, well written, and entertaining. I tried to correct spelling, grammar, and punctuation mistakes for a year or two, but life was just too short, and I needed to go out and play, smell the roses, and dance. It is fun, but serious researching requires original source material.
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Tsk-tsk,
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Brian, what is the serious research you draw from “original source material” (an empty self-congratulatory phrase)?
And have you ever tried to correct all the factual and grammatical mistakes that exist on every page of every newspaper and every page of every website you daily browse? What! You didn’t notice? Oh.
BTW, where do you find roses in America that yet possess a fragrance? That is something I truly miss.
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@B.J.: have you ever tried to correct all the factual and grammatical mistakes that exist on every page of every newspaper
Actually, yes. That’s what I do for a living. 🙂
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To find scented roses one either plants them or asks flower shops specifically for them. I go to the wholesale flower mart in downtown LA and I just follow my nose…there are some lovely almost lilac colored ones that have a deep rose scent. I also have a small rose bush which produces scented flowers. And yes, I do stop and smell them every day when they are blooming.
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Well, as I said in the previous thread, it’s not uniformly bad, it’s just extremely uneven. My experience has been that the farther you get from the hard sciences the worse it is. And the moderators seem to have evolved into a bipolar distribution of 100% accept at one pole and 100% reject at the other with nobody in the middle.
Cheers,
Earl
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@Earl: Exactly. There’s no quarrel (as far as I can tell) about subjects like the final score of the 1939 Blue-Gray Game… Other subjects can get awfully murky.
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@Larry. Careful, Larry, I’ll set Brian on you and you know what he’ll find.
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I never thought of it that way. It’s almost like wikipedia could be an argument for or against democracy. Hopefully most people are independent thinkers and seek out many sources before deciding.
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You have a higher opinion of “most peoples'” power of discernment than I do.
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While still valid, isn’t this just a rehashing the “wikiality” that Stephen Colbert coined in 2006?
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Is it? I should wiki it!
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Sure! Or turn it into an academic article:
Click to access EJ0983Wikipedia.pdf
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Anybody have any recommendations on the best design for a tinfoil hat? I’m having trouble getting the bill to jut at the right angle. I think it’s an origami kind of thing. I think of Wikipedia the same way I think of Dougie and Spike down at the Roundelay. I don’t believe half of what they say but I still like to listen.
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I just wrap tinfoil around a high heel, and tell people it’s a Schiaparelli.
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Democracy is a great thing, but knowledge is not democratic. Some people have it, some don’t, and the people who have it don’t have time to cha-cha with the people who police wikipedia. If you ever need surgery, about the last thing you’d want to hear as you’re drifting off to lalaland is your surgeon saying “Hey! I read about this great new surgical procedure on wikipedia! Pull up the laptop and let’s give ‘er a go!”
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As a college professor, I can tell you that preventing students from using Wikipedia is something of a losing battle: even if you tell them you won’t accept citations to it, it’s still the first place most of them turn for background information. Five or six years ago there was a lot of talk (and consternation) about this among academics; now it seems many of us have become largely resigned to it. (I try my best to explain to my students why it’s not a reliable source, and to point them in other directions, but you can lead a horse to water, etc.)
That all said, I find myself wanting to defend Wikipedia–at least a little. For some subjects (e.g. early 20th-century popular music, linguistics, steam locomotives, all subjects that seem to attract devoted and knowledgeable editors) it can actually be quite excellent. Of course, the problem is that unless you’re an expert yourself, you can’t know to what degree of excellence any given article might actually possess. But given the expense and relative inaccessibility of peer-reviewed reference works and primary source databases, it’s often the best source the public has access to. (At least in my field, subscribing to the most important scholarly databases would cost hundreds of dollars a year if you don’t have access to them through an institutional affiliation.)
Finally, I’d like to point out (if you don’t know this already) that the spurious name “Ann” currently makes no appearance on the Black Dahlia entry. So perhaps there’s some hope.
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Well, done! Having been born in and above the ground in Los Angeles for over 50 years, we have had the misfortune to be victimized by a lot of loose reporting that rarely ever gets to be corrected. Wikipedia certainly cannot be relied upon as factual. All we can hope is that people understand that is a place, that perhaps should be identified at best, as “folklore” and be identified as such.
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I’m not sure why my original comment here was lost or unapproved, but I wanted to point out that many “serious” history books also have big glaring errors. Not only do you have to be an expert to recognize them, as Edmond Johnson said, you also have to be familiar with more than one topic: I have seen mistakes in scholarly articles–in one case, a major one–that stemmed from an ignorance of costume history. It wasn’t the author’s subject, and led to a misinterpretation of the facts they found. Unfortunately, everyone researching any kind of topic has to take what they find with a certain amount of salt. I think lmharnisch was particularly unlucky, because the Black Dahlia case attracts more attention from “Wikipediots” than most other entries. I haven’t had the “revert” problem on pages I’ve contributed bits to, and I have found valuable leads on other pages. I disagree that Wikipedia as a whole has so little merit, but the idea that its claims need to be checked is probably a good thing to spread, as long as people aren’t just thinking, “oh, if it’s in a printed book and not on Wikipedia, it must be right!”
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OK, smart guys. Where else in all the world can you find a list like THIS: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Angeles_Common_Council, Just click on the links and you will find information you can find nowhere else other than in the citations upon which the articles rely, and you can always go to those cites if you want to check up on them.
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That’s an easy one:
Los Angeles city officials.
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This is why I love you, Larry.
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