Wicked-Pedia! Millions trust its every word. But Wikipedia, the error-ridden encyclopaedia, has become a dangerous tool

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1146029/Wicked-Pedia-Millions-trust-word-But-Wikipedia-error-ridden-encyclopaedia-dangerous-tool.html

By Jonathan Margolis

15 February 2009

Did you know that Gordon Ramsay is a pigeon fancier on the quiet, whose birds have won several prizes? Or that Simon Cowell has a parrot called Piers? Or that Israel has secretly developed a 'death ray' that kills only non-Jews?

Of course you don't, because I just made all these 'facts' up. Yet if I wanted, whether for a joke or for malicious, political reasons, to make them public and watch them seep insidiously into the public consciousness, I would know exactly what to do.

A few years ago my choices would have been to stand up at Speakers' Corner in London and rant, or to write on a lavatory wall. But all I'd need today would be to fire up my computer and go to Wikipedia on the internet and type away.

Wikipedia has become a dangerous tool for lazy students, spiteful cranks and truth-twisting politicians

I could be sure that within a few minutes, a handful of gullible readers around the world would read and believe each 'fact'. The ones about Ramsay and Cowell are too harmless to ring any bells as being obvious lies, while the invention about Israel would fan the fire of many people's racist fantasies.

So there's a reasonable chance that one or the other myth would swiftly escalate from hoax to rumour to accepted truth.

Because much as it might pain those who know better, most people who use Wikipedia seem to believe every word they read.

Even so, most of us still sense there's something fishy about this gigantic free online encyclopaedia.

Wikipedia  -  to which anyone, whether they are qualified, knowledgeable or, indeed, sane, can contribute  -  has sprung up in just a few years to become one of the world's ten most popular websites.

Surely some mistake?

Wikipedia hoaxes have become a news staple. Recent ones have included the suggestion that Alan Titchmarsh, recipient of the Bad Sex Award for embarrassing passages in fiction, is rewriting the Kama Sutra (ha ha); that the population of the village of Denshaw, near Manchester, is infested with tapeworms (ho ho); and Robbie Williams made his pre-Take That living 'by eating domestic pets in pubs' (hilarious).

For a month-and-a-half, Wikipedia even reported that Margaret Thatcher was a fictitious character.

Only last week, a Tory Party worker altered a Wikipedia entry on Titian after a Commons clash between Gordon Brown and David Cameron over the artist's age. At Prime Minister's Questions, Mr Cameron had mocked Mr Brown for talking of Titian as being 90, claiming that, in fact, he had died aged 86.

Back at Tory HQ, the Party worker noticed that, although historians disagree over the age at which Titian died, Mr Brown was actually nearer the mark. So he changed the date of the painter's death on the relevant Wikipedia entry  -  just as anyone could have done.

Isn't it astonishing, then, that still we return to Wikipedia in our millions for serious information?

Whether we're trying to answer a quiz question, settle an argument with a friend, check a point for a child's homework, cheat as an idle student, or even clarify a fact for a business presentation, we rely on its inexhaustible supply of free and seemingly authoritative facts being a computer mouse click away. Wikipedia is even available on many of our mobile phones.

But as we're consulting this dodgy oracle, do we ever ask ourselves the most pertinent question of all: why would people go to the trouble of writing such vast amounts of information for no reward  -  unless they have some hidden agenda?

The truth is that we should kick our Wikipedia habit, however seductive the site is and easy to access its contents. To my mind, Wikipedia is nothing less than a monster.

Much of its content is, I have to admit, OK. But the good stuff is fatally undermined by a toxic scattering of misleading rubbish like my fake facts would be, if I went to the minimal effort of posting them.

And this junk information poisons the well of collective knowledge. It renders everything on Wikipedia suspect. At any one stage, it is estimated that there are 100,000 'sabotaged' pages on Wikipedia  -  which means the chances of coming across false information is one in 70.

This might not sound much, but it is enough for teachers in schools and universities to be deeply concerned about the site, telling their students not to confuse a fleeting 'click search' with actual <cite>research. </cite>Teachers try to crack down on anyone lazy enough to copy verbatim, or 'cut and paste', its frequently dubious material into their essays.

One, Professor Tara Brabazon of the University of Brighton, has explicitly banned first-year students from using Wikipedia  -  or Google  -  and insists on them sticking to reading lists.

Too many students don't use their own brains enough,' she says. 'We need to bring back the important values of research and analysis.'

Other colleges have followed suit not only here in Britain but also in America, where the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, the University of California in Los Angeles and Syracuse University in New York have all banned the use of Wikipedia as a source for material.

The truth is that Wikipedia's journey from delightful idea to cultural juggernaut to international bad joke is something of a fable for our times.

It shows how a combination of idealism and technology is falling into disrepute because of something its young progenitors forgot, or were too well-intentioned, to factor in  -  the sad truth that a small but substantial minority of the public are too malicious, mischievous or plain nuts to have their outpourings given a supposedly respectable platform.

The internet, heaven help us, provides a wonderful opportunity for all these kinds of people to let off steam  -  and there is nothing wrong with that. But surely they shouldn't be encouraged to do so on a site posing as an encyclopaedia.

So who is behind Wikipedia? How has it become so phenomenally successful since it was launched in January 2001? And can anything control the monster now that it's been unleashed?

Wikipedia's founder Jimmy Wales was an unlikely character to have started a universal work of scholarly reference. He is a one-time soft pornographer from Alabama. My source? Wikipedia, actually.

The story goes that he was awestruck as a child by his first encyclopaedia, bought for him from a travelling salesman who visited the family home in Huntsville, Alabama.

Born in 1966 to a private school teacher and a grocery store manager, he excelled at maths and made enough of a fortune as an options trader in Chicago to support himself for the rest of his life.

As the dotcom bubble inflated, he headed to Silicon Valley in California to start a company that ran what he calls a 'male interest site'. Then he alighted on the seemingly crazy idea of creating a free online encyclopaedia, written 'by the people, for the people', embarking on the venture with Larry Sanger, a website editor.

They were able to create the website thanks to a computer program called 'wiki' (a Hawaiian term meaning 'quick'). The aim was to create the biggest repository of human knowledge, all of it written and edited from scratch by absolutely anyone with time to spare.

To give the bearded Jimmy Wales his due, he soon realised that miscreants were taking over the internet asylum he so generously built them.

In the run-up to the Iraq War, constant sabotage to the pages of Tony Blair and George Bush forced him to introduce a policy that denied to anonymous users editing rights of major political figures.

That did not stop an extraordinary  -  and offensive  -  fiasco from occurring during President Obama's inauguration. After Senator Ted Kennedy left the inauguration lunch in an ambulance having had a seizure, Wikipedia stated that he had died  -  even though he is still alive.

And the very moment when Bruce Springsteen, Obama's superstar supporter, was launching into his song Born To Run at the Super Bowl's half-time show earlier this month, his Wikipedia entry read, simply: 'Bruce Springsteen. This guy kinda sucks.'

Later, visitors to the page were given a little more to go on: 'Bruce Frederick Joseph Springsteen (born, September 23, 1949), nicknamed-"The Boss" is a FAG.' Anyone who then pressed the 'refresh' button on their computer found the entire entry was translated into Japanese.

Wales has accepted that more controls have to be introduced. But can the Wikipedia monster actually <cite>be </cite>controlled now that it is so big?

The company has just 23 employees, based in Silicon Valley, so its method of minimising errors relies in the first instance on Wikipedia's readers spotting and editing inaccuracies.

Here, of course, lies the problem: there's no way of knowing whether the person who spots an error and edits an entry on any subject is a saboteur with some bizarre agenda of their own  -  or whether they are simply introducing innocent mistakes through ignorance.

A layer above these self-appointed Wikipedia policemen there are around 75,000 Wikipedia-approved volunteer editors around the world scrutinising the seven million pages of entries in their spare time and attempting to delete the obvious rubbish as it appears.

Using 'real' sources, from the establishment media and academic material, plus their own expert knowledge, they assess what is incorrect or unfair and remove it.

Sometimes they are remarkably quick at taking down crackpot stuff, so the entries on well-known topics, especially in science (on which they are said to be quite sound) or biographies of important personalities, are often accurate enough.

After the Ted Kennedy fiasco, Wales is proposing that editing a biography of a living person should become a two- stage process  -  anonymous contributors can still edit, but their amendments will have to be checked by someone higher up the Wikipedia food chain before they can be published on the internet.

But this suggestion alone has led to problems. The more crazed 'Wikipedians', as contributors are known, claim that this will amount to censorship  -  and the very ideal of Wikipedia, a site written by the people for the people, will be jeopardised.

'It is not in the interests of the community to trample on the views of a large and passionate minority who wish to maintain the principle that all editors have an equal right to edit and equal responsibility for what they produce,' writes one such objector.

To top all of this, Wikipedia is also in financial crisis. Wales could have made himself very rich by turning it into a traditional media company, but he refuses to accept advertising and has kept it as a charity  -  and the charity has recently had to pass the begging bowl.

He made a personal appeal over the internet in December to 'keep Wikipedia free', which raised $6 million (&pound;4.2 million). Some suggest this will not be enough to keep the organisation going for long.

If Wikipedia does disappear or if, as could conceivably happen, it were taken over and commercialised (and perhaps made a professional service) by someone like Bill Gates or Google, its amateurish, free-for-all days will doubtless be mourned. But at least those monstrous inaccuracies would disappear with it.