This New Yorker article on Wikipedia contains a surprising quotation from founder Jimmy Wales:
In his view, misinformation, propaganda, and ignorance are responsible for many of the world?s ills. ?I?m very much an Enlightenment kind of guy,? Wales told me. The promise of the Internet is free knowledge for everyone, he recalls thinking. How do we make that happen?
As an undergraduate, he had read Friedrich Hayek?s 1945 free-market manifesto, ?The Use of Knowledge in Society,? which argues that a person?s knowledge is by definition partial, and that truth is established only when people pool their wisdom. Wales thought of the essay again in the nineteen-nineties, when he began reading about the open-source movement, a group of programmers who believed that software should be free and distributed in such a way that anyone could modify the code. He was particularly impressed by ?The Cathedral and the Bazaar,? an essay, later expanded into a book, by Eric Raymond, one of the movement?s founders. ?It opened my eyes to the possibility of mass collaboration,? Wales said.
I made a similar point last week, citing Hayek in discussing why the blogosphere was structurally superior to the old-media model of seeking out the truth. But I have been quite suspicious of Wikipedia.
My question is: Am I being unfair to Wikipedia? I must admit, my concern with the site is that it is susceptible, at least in the short term, to misinformation and propaganda. My suspicion of Wiki is in keeping with my suspicion of “indymedia” free-for-all “citizen-reporter” blogs ? but whereas I tarred Wiki by association with them, I sought to differentiate blogs that build credibility from those kind of blogs from, as I called them, “barking mad ravers.” Wiki may have its Hayekian underpinning, but it is also based in the open-source movement, a movement that’s behind indymedia. I appear to have applied a double standard in my treatment of Wikipedia and the blogosphere.
The New Yorker article discussed aspects of those problems I had with Wiki, including “WikiTrolls” (“user[s] who persistently violat[e] the site?s guidelines or otherwise engages in disruptive behavior”), “editing wars,” and most crucially, the problem that “[f]or all its protocol, Wikipedia?s bureaucracy doesn?t necessarily favor truth.”
To answer my question, I think that yes, I am being too hard on Wikipedia to call it a “socialist’s encyclopedia.” Wiki is open to socialist propaganda (and other kinds as well), however, but as the article describes, the site is developing guidelines and regulations to police itself. So it has features a Hayekian could well appreciate, and that’s an aspect of Wikipedia I had missed despite seeing it in the blogosphere at large.
Nevertheless, I don’t think it’s unfair at all to counsel potential Wiki users to “be exceedingly cautious about using Wikipedia as a source for anything; at best it could be used as a starting point for investigation into a topic.” One cannot know at any point when an entry is reliable or when it has just been sabotaged by a propagandist or troll. On individual blogs, however, one knows who the contributor is and can judge credibility accordingly ? Wiki doesn’t afford readers that luxury, leaving them to rely upon the Wiki process to ensure the credibility of the entry. That process may very well work in the aggregate, but it still renders the credibility of any particular entry too uncertain for my taste.
