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. ...

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:



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.

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.




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.

This is a really good article.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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



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.



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.



There's always eb.com. :rolleyes:

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


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.)

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?

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



Britannica has survived since 1768 with zero volunteers.

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.


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.

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.

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...?

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.

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.

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.



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



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



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.

Fuck you. That would discount 90% of the best editors, all of whom live outside the jurisdiction of the United States. And I don't want my children's source of online knowledge dominated by people from the United States thank you. It is bad enough already.



Where do you think Britannica was founded?

I think that that gets to the crux of the issue.

Wikipedia can exist, and be as big as it is, and if it existed as it was originally intended, as a "fun, not serious" version of Nupedia, to get some articles started, then its fine. If it exists as Everything2 does as a kind of group blog, then its fine. The problem is that people take it seriously.

NPOV is one of the major fundamental problems with Wikipedia, because of the theoretical impossibility of it. People should be saying what their bias is, not pretending that they don't have one. This then leads to people being anonymous and pretending that they're not biased in order to create quality articles, or else alternatively to write on topics which they know nothing about.

The hatred of experts is another of the major fundamental problems with Wikipedia. To have articles created by non-experts is one thing, but to not allow experts in a field to write is very wrong. There are many biographies on living people in which the subject of the matter was banned for trying to correct inaccuracies about themselves. The most expert person in the world is banned from an article because they were submitting "original research". This kind of thing happens all of the time, and is a fundamental serious problem.

The anonymity is also a problem. Anonymity would be fine if we did not take Wikipedia seriously, but by having anonymity people can secretly be trying to win an election through dubious means, they might be lying about credentials, they might have more than one account, and they might have a secret bias. This adds to the other problems and makes matters worse.

Ultimately, the most serious problem with Wikipedia is that it changes truth. Something can be established fact, with only a tiny 1% of people who believe that it isn't, and then that 1% creates an article on Wikipedia, and for whatever reason they claim ownership of that article, so that it can never be undone (Cuba, Lyndon LaRouche, Lockerbie Bombing, Port Arthur massacre are the 4 that spring to mind immediately that we've discussed at length here). This lie is then picked up by all of the sites that mirror Wikipedia. School students use it in reports on the topic (because careless schools allow it to be used as a source). Then more and more people use it. Until eventually what Wikipedia has written, which was an outright lie, becomes the accepted version of truth. And the 1% who originally believed this lie ends up as 90% or more.

There are enough lies in the world, thanks to politicians and various hidden agendas out there. Journalists and historians are forever working tirelessly to try to stop these lies and get some kind of truth out there. The last thing that we need is for a place like Wikipedia to pop up and to randomly have someone change truth about something.

Jimbo Wales decided that he wanted to be 38 again, instead of being 39, so changed his own birthday on his article. He decided that he didn't like Larry Sanger anymore, so stripped him of even co-founder status (Larry Sanger seems to be the person who created Wikipedia, and if anyone is stripped of co-founder status, it should be Jimbo). He didn't like the attention he got from founding Wikipedia on money from pornography, so he pretended that Bomis wasn't a porn site.

And if things like that don't demonstrate that Wikipedia is changing history, then I don't know what more to say.

There is a difference between documenting history and changing it. Wikipedia has gone well beyond mere documentation.

Isn't that a bit insulting to the United Kingdom?

Youth may fade, but immaturity can last a lifetime.

Make them take an ethics test, instead.





People in the USA hate science and vote for idiots.

But "possessing a synoptic view of ostensibly unrelated data" would violate WP:NOR.

It's obviously the reason for the edit counts/registered user counts/active user counts. I think it's the original source of the high Google/Alexa rankings, although those numbers have since been inflated by other factors.

I think you're hitting on a fundamental culture problem, here. I don't think NPOV is a bad editorial ideal, but you run into problems largely because part of the culture of Wikipedia is disdain for anyone who holds a strongly-held belief and edits in that area. (I think this is caused by a combination of the general anti-elitism and the fact that many people who wear a cause on their sleeve turn out to be fanatics.)


When you have a project that any old shlub can participate in, eliminating anonymity doesn't accomplish much, particularly without some mechanism for confirming identity.

Unless you had a heavy-duty mechanism for confirming identity, you would have much the same problems as Wikipedia does with anonymity.

Remember, we thought we knew who Essjay was.


I think this is right and wrong, but I can't really form my argument. More later, I guess.


Well, yeah. It's a criticism of the ideal Wikipedia; even if Wikipedia reached its stated goals with 100% effectiveness, it would still have the problem that it can only be an executive summary of the sources because the users can't be trusted to do their own original research.

This is something worth discussing later; the difference between criticism of the ideal Wikipedia (Wikipedia if it achieved all its stated goals perfectly) and the actual Wikipedia (how Wikipedia runs as a practical matter and the people involved with it). Both types of criticism are necessary, but the solutions need to take different tacks.

The rampant cross-linking is what does it, and the great overlooked thing is that the different language wikipedias all interwiki link with none of the SEO-barring nofollow limits. I.e., on top of everyone linking to WP from every last website and blog ever (which doesn't hurt), it means that en.wp gets TREMENDOUS pagerank authority. en.wiki then links back to all the various fr.wiki, de.wiki, etc., for articles in other languages/transwiki whatever its called. Those in turn link back to en.wiki, which feeds it in an endless Pagerank bonanza. If they actually designed the mediawiki model with this in mind, whoever did it is a design genius. It makes each *.wikipedia.org tremendously powerful, all feeding off the central en.wiki hive.

You don't have to be an actual teenager to have a teenager mind and habits where other people are concerned. See this creature, for example.

The United States jurisdiction part has to do with the legal system. You can't serve a US subpoena outside the US. People who commit libels should be held responsible for their actions. They wouldn't never do it, so don't worry about it.





Granted, but immaturity is more likely among minors.

Uh, pretty much every country has libel laws. And those in the UK are notoriously plaintiff-friendly.

Let me correct myself: I submit that admins should be over age 21 and live within the jurisdiction of the United States.



The nature of the wiki system does not allow Wikipedia to work properly. We need an alternative to what Jimbo calls the "Cabal."

I think it would be sufficient if the admins would: 1) provide IRL identity and contact information; 2) Agree to submit to US (FLA) venue and jurisdiction 3) agree to US law in choice of law matters.

If so, then why not make a rule that only Americans can use the internet at all? (wince)

Because the United States is the only country with laws?

Sure you can. You've never heard of cross-border extra-territorial lawsuits? Dow Jones US was sued in an Australian court, for libel (or was it defamation, hm) and they paid up. Yahoo (US) was sued in France, and they had to either quit selling Nazi items, or their CEO was subject to multiple fines. Doesn't anyone else here read the WSJ? Or the FT? Google both cases - they are online.

The question is first merit (is it worth the effort) and then once you've decided "yes" then means of enforcement (making sure the judgement be honored). Both merit and enforcement are easier in cases against a big company - very easy if the company does business in the country where the judgement was levied, very VERY easy if they have an office in the country. This of course assuming the case went in your favor.

For Wikipedia, it is a question of how much effort it is to (for example) squeeze 400 bucks out of some acne-prone psychopath sitting on a desktop in the Ukraine. Usually it isn't worth the effort.

It depends on your favorite hobbies. Mine is golf.

Who is "they"?