This Blogpedia is what I call my ratatouille of blogs, pages, scripts that contain information, knowledge, facts, stories and opinions on just about everything that interests me. A long time ago I used to be an avid reader and user of wikipedia when I first came into contact with the site. I still use wikipedia on some occasions, especially if I need to know something about a music album, but over the years I have come to realise that wikipedia is not all what it is cracked up to be. Wikipedia in my opinion flat out fails what it supposed to do, namely offer true knowledge to the masses.
An encyclopedia according to many, should offer true and unbiased information. But what is truth? And is not everyone biased in a way? And if you think the whole world has access to the internet then you could not be more wrong. There are whole stretches of the globe that either have poor access to the internet, or no access at all. Besides in what language are you going to offer your encyclopedia? Not everyone is able to read English. Wikipedia tries to combat those problems, but it fails miserably. Sure there are translations of a lot of articles, but if you know a couple of foreign languages besides English, then you will soon realise most of the translations are of rather poor quality. There is also no consistency in the translated articles. Some translated articles are exactly the same and a mere copy of the original, while other pages are entirely different. What exactly are we reading here?
The problem is that any fool can write a wikipedia article, or worse moderate the articles of others. Where is the hierarchy? Where is the accountability? Where is the enforcement of rules and laws? In my opinion Wikipedia does not have any of that. The Wikipedia moderators are a small group of a few hundred moderators. It is a society that lives in a remote world behind a computer screen and it is a society that does not function. Logic is an important factor in any quest for true knowledge, but for logical conclusions to be valid its premisse also have to valid and here the moderators have a problem, they are so far out of reality of the real world it seems.
So who moderates the moderators? And what is their bias? The naivety of the creators is rather obvious to me. The creator or creators must be American, since he or they expect the whole world to read wikipedia when not everyone has access to the internet. How do you expect articles to be fair, honest and factual, when every person has a different personal opinion, a different personal background and their own personal biases? Lets get real people. The founders of Wikipedia want, expect and predict the impossible.
There is a vast bulk of information on wikipedia, but the growth in contributions is declining. There is one obvious reason for that decline. There is so much already there, that anything more, will be more of the same, but there are also other reasons. New contributors are not experienced in the netiquette of writing new articles or altering old articles. Many new contributors I am sure will quit out of frustration. Wiki Moderators are in a power position, a position with almost no accountability and with no checks and balances. Lets be honest the Wikipedia community does not exactly work in a democratic way. In fact if you read between the lines, then most are quite scary and extremist. You can also moderate too much. Some articles that can stir heated debates have been moderated in the extreme, that such articles offer almost no context and hence are sometimes of little value, because they offer little to no information beyond the obvious stuff that is common knowledge to all.
The biggest problem is that wikipedia appears to be neutral, it appears to be factual, but it is not. What Wikipedia lacks above all, is transparency. You do not know the person who writes the article. A real encyclopedia does not have that problem so much. Real encyclopedia are not free and so if you are going to pay for a book then you will take some care about the credentials of the writer. Not so for wikipedia it seems. Nothing is free in life, which is also a problem for wikipedia. So where do they get the money for the servers? If you think this fund-raising of Wikipedia is transparent, then think again. Wikipedia also limits its scope to mere information. Just how stuff works is explained to readers with wikihow. I think that this is more trouble than it is worth, because sometimes you want to know the how along with the why, the where and the who.
So like anything else, Wikipedia too has flaws. It is not transparent, it is not consistent and it certainly is not neutral in any way. So that leaves the reader with a lot of problems. Problems for which there are no easy solutions at least not in the way wikipedia works. So who reads wikipedia? I reckon they are the same kind of people as me, the visitors are: casual readers with too much time on their hands, people who play the wikipedia game (I know you do too), people who need information for their report or essay that they need to write for school, people who can not remember a particular thing and want to look it up, people who lack information about a certain subject and look for it in articles, people who cannot remember dates or years on which certain events took place, people who debate about anything remotely political and need data that supposedly backs up their case, or people who are stuck with a problem and need information on how to solve it. So visitors need to be entertained, they need good advice and they need accurate and true information. In many respects Wikipedia fails to give what the readers want.
Here are some of some of my bad experiences with wikipedia as a reader.
1.
Diabetes was listed in DSM4 list on wikipedia for many months up until a few years ago. Diabetes is a chronic illness, not a mental illness, even a layman like myself with no medical training knows better. Wikipedia was just plain in the wrong here.
2.
Some English based wikipedia articles about economics and econometrics offer formulas and examples of calculations. The Dutch and Continental European approach to this kind of math is very different than the Anglo-Saxon world. We use comma where the English use dots and points, we use brackets, where the English do not. I have had a good education and know the differences and I know the effects, but there are many people who do not know these differences. They will make mistakes in their calculations. An encyclopedia is not a school, yet with so many users on the internet there are dangerous consequences here with so many people in the wrong. This is an example of why the strict defining line between a wiki and a wikihow is no good.
3.
Articles are too strictly categorised. Most people have a specialised education. I see many historical articles for example that are historically accurate, but when they provide information about other fields, like Geography for example, then these can be plain in the wrong. There is still one such obvious mistake to be found in the article about Operation Cobra, obvious to at least those who have learned at least cartography. No field of expertise is fully specialised, physics requires math, historians when explaining world events need geography. I have read a lot of world war 2 articles that offer faulty conclusions about cause and consequences in that manner. Speaking of expertise, how do you check the expertise of a contributor? The answer is that you can not check that really, although it turns out on more than one occasion that the expertise of contributors is highly questionable and sometimes not there at all. For example it turned out that one of largest contributors to history articles in the United States was not an historian. He had no formal education beyond highschool it seems.
4.
Wikipedia articles do reference to other articles and books, but you can not always check where the information comes from. Naturally biases exist, but some are more extreme than others. I have no qualms with bridging different political milieus, but extremism is something I do not like from whatever political side they come from, Libertarians or Anarchists, Socialists or Communists, Fascists or Nazis andFundementalist religious people from whatever religion. I do not care in what way they distort the truth to meet with their political agenda. And I have a feeling there are too many of them to be found on wikipedia. For instance it is rather obvious that most American philosophical articles were written by Libertarians. Should these people really have the final say?
So why does wikipedia keep at it the way they do now? Are they incompetent, or is it as the saying goes, "Power corrupts". I for one am doing what the plebs did in Ancient Rome, simply "Walk Away" and I am not going to return and contribute until a constitution with checks and balances have been put in place with a technical reform. Why do articles have to be moderated anyway? Nothing is neutral and unbiased, so why bother with the underlining of articles, saying citation needed. Either take it as it is, or do not take it all. Why not have several articles by various contributors about the same subject? Is it really so important to have just one article about the same subject? I think not. Give the articles numbers instead, so you can GET it, get it? Or is my php joke too difficult for you to understand? If so, then wikipedia will not help you understand the joke I just made. Let the people decide for themselves what they should read. It is more democratic that way. Just make sure you have a good search engine. Sure some moderation is still required, because freedom of speech is one thing, but discrimination and inciting hatred is wrong.