ABC World News Tonight on 6 March 2007 carried a story over the recent Wikipedia scandal involving the user Essjay. Let me disclaim, up front, that I don’t know too much about the scandal. However, what I want to say is not so much concerned with the scandal as with the coverage by ABC. Put simply, it seems that ABC News could stand to take a lesson from Wikipedia’s Neutral Point of View Policy.
Perhaps it is acceptable nowadays for news organizations to endorse points of view in their coverage. It’s just that I was under the impression that this was the purpose of editorial articles or special interest stories, not normal news coverage.
From what I do know about the Essjay problems, it was definitely a problem that needed to be fixed. Wikipedia is built, as Jimmy Wales noted, on trust and when that trust is broken things something needs to be done. What the news clip didn’t relate is how useful Wikipedia actually is, despite these isolated incidents. The closest it came is the fact that Wikipedia has 25 times the articles that the Encyclopaedia Britannica has. This was ruined, of course, by the immediately following question, “how many of these can be trusted?”
This would fall under the neutrality problem of undue weight given to one point of view over the other. Yes, there are critics of Wikipedia, but there are also a lot of people who think it’s pretty darn cool useful. Where else can you go and look up some economics term that you don’t know. For example… positional externalities. Before Wikipedia, you would google the term and come up with a 34 page paper by Robert Frank as the first hit. Not that I have anything against Mr. Frank; I learned about positional externalities from his textbook, but it’s still not what most people want to read. (Granted, that Wikipedia page on positional externalities was only put up this morning, by me, but that’s another pro-Wikipedia point I won’t make now.)
So why does the news media usually give Wikipedia such un-rave reviews? Perhaps they’re scared of the idea behind it. The whole news institution depends on professionally created content, and empowering people to express themselves doesn’t bode well. (Given, I’d much rather read a newspaper than Wikinews, but that’s news, not an encyclopedia. And there isn’t exactly a plethora of free encyclopedias, unlike news sites.) If people can share what they know, what will happen to this world? Nothing good, according to the media.
My final point concerns the use of Wikipedia by students. They interviewed Bob Thompson, a college professor about the subject. (Though it was interesting that they didn’t provide where or what he teaches, especially considering the whole Essjay scandal was about someone posing as a professor. I’m definitely not accusing ABC News of faking a college professor, just saying they could have attributed their sources better.) My response to that interview is that any college student worth his/her salt should know not to cite Wikipedia as a source. Of course that’s not going to fly. But that doesn’t mean it’s not a useful starting place for research over a subject.
Just once, on some national news program, I’d like to see a piece that displays the good of Wikipedia as much as the bad.
I completely concur, ‘specially with the penultimate paragraph.