Wiki’s world slammed for inaccuracy

A row is brewing about the quality of Wikipedia, the world’s largest encyclopaedia, written and updated entirely by volunteers over the internet.

Critics of Wikipedia say that many entries are spoilt by errors, some of them elementary, submitted by zealots who are not as knowledgeable on a given subject as they think they are. Users who correct the errors are often over-ruled in minutes or hours by the zealots who simply cut and paste their original entries back in when they are changed.

The debate was kicked off by technology author Nicholas Carr, who shot to fame in 2004 with his claim that corporate IT had become a commodity in the book, Does IT Matter? In his latest essay, The Amorality of Web 2.0, Carr compares Wikipedia to the Encyclopaedia Britannica – and finds it wanting.

An even more pervasive problem than zealotry, says Carr, is simply the bad writing. He cites Wikipedia’s entries on actress Jane Fonda and computer billionaire Bill Gates as proof. “An encyclopaedia can’t just have a small percentage of good entries and be considered a success. I would argue, in fact, that the overall quality of an encyclopaedia is best judged by its weakest entries rather than its best,” wrote Carr.

However, while Carr’s claims have drawn the support of many – who say that some of the material published on Wikipedia is of dubious provenance – they have provoked a strong defence of the online encyclopaedia from Wikipedians.

They point to the entries of Gates and Fonda in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, which, while factually accurate, are both brief and dry. Wikipedia can also boast more than twice as many entries.

The claims and counter-claims strike at the heart of the Wiki concept, in which documents can be freely authored and updated by anyone with the appropriate rights. In the case of Wikipedia, that means every internet user who clicks ‘edit’ on one of its articles.

The free and easy nature of Wikipedia has quickly made it the world’s biggest encyclopaedia by a large margin, with more than 370,000 entries in English and translations into a diverse variety of languages, including Turkish, Arabic and Japanese.

Its use and popularity has rocketed since it started to gain mainstream media attention and become highly ranked on Google searches.