By SCOTT DEWING
Published: November 2005

• “It is by no means certain that Wikipedia will achieve the reliability and depth of Britannica. What’s remarkable is that this is even possible!”
• “Maybe it will turn into something and maybe it won’t but currently it’s pretty lame.”
• “I like your focus on long-term development, sustainable development. I think the web has sorely lacked that, and I hope when you say ‘by 2005’ you fully intend to be still alive and growing in 2005…Keep focusing on improving your quality, and eventually it’ll be ‘Britannica who?’”

The above excerpts are from a discussion forum on kuor5hin.org posted in September 2001, shortly after the launch of wikipedia.com, an ambitious online “open-source” encyclopedia. Founders Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger were pioneering a novel and controversial idea: an online encyclopedia that could be edited by anyone with a computer and Internet access. Let me state that again: EDITED BY ANYONE. Were they crazy? Perhaps.

When Wikipedia first launched, it was indeed “pretty lame”, with a scant number of articles of dubious quality. Anybody who came to the site could edit an existing article or create a new one on any topic they like. Four years later, Wikipedia has grown to more than 750,000 articles in the English language and hundreds of thousands in a hundred other languages. Today, Wikipedia is global. It’s big. It is one of the most popular reference sites on the Internet, boasting about a million hits per day. And it is still highly controversial because it has remained true to its roots: anyone can edit anything.

According to Wikipedia, “Almost all visitors may edit Wikipedia’s articles and have their changes instantly displayed. Wikipedia is built on the belief that collaboration among users will improve articles over time, in much the same way that open-source software develops. Its authors need not have any expertise or formal qualifications in the subjects which they edit, and users are warned that their contributions may be edited mercilessly and redistributed at will by anyone who so wishes…Articles are always subject to editing, such that Wikipedia does not declare any article finished.”

Criticism of Wikipedia’s quality and reliability as an accurate reference source has been both vociferous and continuous—especially in academic circles where Wikipedia has been cursed as “something wicked this way comes.” In fact, many academics and educators refuse to recognize Wikipedia reference material as authentic and useable in research papers.

“However closely a Wikipedia article may at some point in its life attain reliability, it is forever open to the uninformed or semiliterate meddler,” wrote Robert McHenry in an article for techcentralstation.com entitled The Faith-Based Encyclopedia. “The user who visits Wikipedia to learn about some subject, to confirm some matter of fact, is rather in the position of a visitor to a public restroom. It may be obviously dirty, so that he knows to exercise great care, or it may seem fairly clean, so that he may be lulled into a false sense of security. What he certainly does not know is who has used the facilities before him.”

Mr. McHenry is the former Editor-in-Chief of the Encyclopædia Britannica. This probably has something to do with him comparing Wikipedia to a public restroom. Sophomoric insults aside, McHenry articulates many academics and educators concerns that Wikipedia can’t be trusted because of its open-source nature.

Wikipedia itself is a resource for reading about its many criticisms: “Wikipedia’s claim to be an encyclopedia has been controversial, more so as it has gained prominence. Wikipedia has been criticized for a perceived lack of reliability, comprehensiveness, and authority…Critics argue that allowing anyone to edit makes Wikipedia an unreliable work. Wikipedia contains no formal peer review process for fact-checking, and the editors themselves may not be well-versed in the topics they write about.”

If the Internet has resulted in the “democratization of information” then Wikipedia is the beginning of the “democratization of knowledge”. Perhaps this is what makes most academics, educators and librarians—the traditional keepers and disseminators of knowledge—hostile toward Wikipedia. At the heart of the debate, is the premise that knowledge is sacred and only the high-priests—that is, the experts—can be entrusted with the interpretation and qualification of that knowledge. Anything else would be sacrilegious and wicked. This is the cross that Wikipedia must bear.

And it is a cross that we must all bear too because in the end no democracy or democratic process is a spectator sport. If we are to realize and benefit from the true potential of the Internet, we have a duty to actively participate in the debates that are shaping the world’s future. This is exactly what Wikipedia invites every netizen to do, resulting in great debate, upheaval and strife. And it is out of that debate, upheaval and strife, that real change in the world occurs.

This is not a blanket endorsement of Wikipedia as a 100 percent valid source of information. It isn’t and never will be under its current policy of anyone-can-edit. However, that shouldn’t be the basis for branding it as something-wicked-this-way-comes; rather, it is to advocate that we should embrace and use Wikipedia for what it is: a dynamic source of information that—like the Encyclopædia Britannica itself—can make a fundamental and valuable contribution to our development as individuals and as members of an increasingly global society.

It is by no means certain that Wikipedia will achieve the reliability and depth of Encyclopædia Britannica. What’s remarkable is that it makes possible an open dialog of knowledge and direct individual involvement in our collective quest for the truth.