Wikipedophilia

by David Holtzman

Wikipedia continues to impress me. Slashdot notes a BBC story citing a Nature article examining the collaborative encyclopedia's accuracy. Their conclusion? it's as accurate as the Encyclopedia Brittanica. There were slightly more errors per article in the free reference then in the venerable British instititution, but the articles were slightly longer, so net-net, it was mostly a wash.

In four years, Wikipedia has grown to more than 1.8 million articles in 200 languages. It's free. The Britannica costs $1400 for the 32 volume set.

I look at the two and put my Darwinian thinking hat on and speculate on which one will be around ten years from now. The Britannica brand is strong, but I predict that in the future the company will focus on niche products, leaving the mainstream online encyclopedia market to the socialist librarians. Encarta drew first blood, but that clicking noise is the wikis biting through the jugular.

The Internet is the universal solvent of information. The post-atomic age aqua regia has barely begun its dissolution of the nice tidy intellectual property dividers painstakingly erected by two centuries of intellectual property lawyers.

I love the young information collectives that are the wikis and if that makes me a communist, than Zdravstvujte tovarishch!

Posted on December 15, 2005

3 Comments
Intellectual Property

I was listening on NPR to an interview with one of the people who did the Nature study and I ended up yelling at the radio for much of the segment. He kept repeating the statistic that his group found 4 errors in Wikipedia to every 3 in Britannica, but this and every other article I read about it neglected to discuss one important thing about the study: The scientists had the opportunity to go back and fix every one of the 162 errors they found after the study was completed! That is the important thing about Wikipedia. It doesn't matter how many errors there are currently in the entries, because the system will always tend towards greater levels of accuracy.

Posted by Mike M. on December 17, 2005

Jimmy Wales admitted that Wikipedia is of lower quality than Britannica in a recent interview with BusinessWeek.

Additionally I find it curious you would label your post wikipedophilia and fail to mention the recent controversy over wikipedia allowing pedophiles control over child issue pages on wikipedia.

Posted by Wikipedophilia on December 19, 2005

The strength of Wikipedia is that it converges, over time, on being correct. Like the rest of the Internet, it has a robust, self-correcting capability.

I believe that it's not reasonable to compare the Britannica and Wikipedia on an early snapshot basis. One will get better, one will not. Linear strategies always lose to the geometric ones over time.

Posted by David Holtzman on December 19, 2005

Warning: This form may not work properly with your style sheet settings!
Not Your Name:
Not Your Email:
Your Name
Username
Email Address
Password
Your Site
Comment
Your Comment
Phone
City