Put down your encyclopedia and go online to search for information

More technology

Technology questions answered

What happens if your PC goes wrong

Later learning - useful sites

Don't miss

The Money Zone

Your eyesight

Wikipedia explained

Wikipedia is fast becoming the first point of call for anyone looking for information on the web – but is it reliable?

Wikipedia www.wikipedia.org has become one of the most consulted works of reference available in the English language. Compiled not by academics, but by the average Joe and Joanne on the street, Wikipedia is the world’s first collaborative encyclopedia, where amateur, expert and enthusiast alike are free to create or contribute to entries on topics and people that interest them. Critics say the information is rarely verified, while fans say the critics are simply missing the point of this online research tool. Join us for a walk on the Wiki side.

‘Wiki’ comes from the Hawaiian phrase wiki wiki, meaning quick, and is also an acronym of ‘what I know is’. The word is synonymous with websites based on open-source software that can be edited quickly and easily by anyone with an interest in a topic. It’s this ability to change articles, in particular, that has attracted the ire of academics. Certain entries give those with strong opinions the opportunity to score a cheap point. For example, the entry on US President George Bush has been amended with negative, satirical, offensive or plain inaccurate material so many times that new and recently registered users are barred from editing it without permission.

Creating false entries or adding inaccurate information to an existing one is called vandalism in the wiki community, and the site’s founders (the not-for-profit Wikimedia Foundation http://wikimediafoundation.org) encourages all users to report those who vandalise, and to correct entries if they feel qualified to do so.

One of the most notorious examples of this involved a man called Brian Chase, who thought it would be funny to post a hoax biographical entry on John Seigenthaler, a respected journalist and former editor of The Tennessean in the US. Among other untruths, Mr Chase claimed Mr Seigenthaler was linked to the assassinations of both John and Robert Kennedy. The libellous content went unnoticed for 132 days before it was removed. Mr Chase was tracked down using his IP address, and was forced to resign from his job and make a personal apology.

The site itself acknowledges that unreliable information can be posted but says that there are so many Wikipedians reading and monitoring contributions that any errors are usually corrected pretty quickly. Wikipedia’s motto is: ‘Given enough eyeballs, all errors are shallow’, but be wary of specialist topics where few users would recognise mistakes. Recently added content may also be dubious – when we looked up the entry on Kate Moss we were surprised to read that she had a degree in mathematics from Cambridge University. When we looked again a few minutes later, her scholarly achievements had been erased.

Incidents like this may seem funny or trivial, but critics have warned that websites like Wikipedia can be very harmful if abused because they are so popular, particularly when entries refer to the actions of politicians, people in the public eye and companies. Wiki fans point out that Wikimedia is a work of reference and all such works are open to question.

The respected scientific journal Nature recently compared the number of inaccuracies in selected articles from Wikipedia and the Encyclopaedia Britannica. They found 162 errors in Wikipedia and 123 in Britannica. Many saw it as a hollow victory, as the study showed that no encyclopaedias – printed or online – are infallible, although the publishers of Britannica argued that Nature’s report was flawed.

So where does this leave the fact-hunting consumer? As a rule, Wikipedia is great as a starting point but don’t take information from a single source as gospel; double-check it against other sources. We think the true beauty of Wikipedia is that it can take you off at tangents that you would never have thought of because of the ease with which links in the text can be clicked.

Take a stroll through a Wikipedia article and click on some of the links. We set off from the entry on the classic satirist and wit Peter Cook and followed links to the actor Kenneth Williams, who Cook wrote for. The Carry On star’s biography led us to London King’s Cross, where Williams was born. Wikipedia points out that this is thought to be the site of a major carry-on between the Romans and the Iceni tribe, whose queen, Boudicca, may be buried beneath platform 9 of King’s Cross station. The next link we chose took us, bizarrely, to something called Alvin and the Chipmunks. Not all Wiki strolls are that unusual, and you’ll usually find plenty of information on the subject you’re interested in.

Written by Laura Frewin

This article was created: 23 November 2006.
This article was last edited: 19 March 2007.

Email  Back to top