I don't usually cover the debate about Wikipedia's reliability, but David Weinberger makes a good point in the July 23 issue of his newsletter, Journal of the Hyperlinked Organization. Excerpt:
Wikipedia has (and deserves) credibility, in part because of its willingness to acknowledge its fallibility....If it contains a warning about the reliability of the page, we'll trust it more. This is only superficially contradictory....Here are some of the warnings available in the Disputes category.
The factual accuracy of this article is disputed....
This article appears to contradict another article....
Some of the information in this article has not been verified and might not be reliable. It should be checked for inaccuracies and modified as needed, citing sources....
[PS: Wikipedia and Weinberger use eye-catching graphic warnings, which make the point very effectively. I'm just reproducing some of their text.]
The fact that Wikipedia encourages us to use these notices give us confidence that Wikipedia is putting our interests over its own.
So, why is it that you don't see such frank notices in traditional sources such as newspapers and encyclopedias? Is it because their articles don't ever suffer from any of these human weaknesses? Oh, sure, newspapers issue corrections after the fact, and "This is non-neutral opinion" is implicit on the Op-Ed page. But why isn't there any finer grain framing of the reliability and nature of what's presented to us in their pages? Can we come to any conclusion except that traditional authorities are more interested in maintaining authority than in helping us reach the truth?
Which in the long run will be devastating to their credibility.
At the end of the issue Weinberger suggests some warnings that "traditional knowledge authorities" could use to match Wikipedia in candor.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 7/26/2006 08:47:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
