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April 23, 2007
Wikipedia and the emergence of order
I have been critical of Wikipedia in the past, so it is only fair that I point out an example where the concept may work. Even so, I still have some reservations. The NY Times reports on Wikipedia's documentation of the Virginia Tech tragedy.
From the contributions of 2,074 editors, at last count, the site created a polished, detailed article on the massacre, with more than 140 separate footnotes, as well as sidebars that profiled the shooter, Seung-Hui Cho, and gave a timeline of the attacks.
Here is a link to the article. It is decently organized, extremely well-documented, and (best of all) it is in Wikipedia's "semi-protected" category. That means it cannot be edited by anonymous or newly registered users.
Somewhat counterintuitively (except perhaps to free-market economists), the fact that this is such a high profile event probably makes the page less prone to the sort of vandalism that has been an occasional problem for Wikipedia. Questionable and incorrect information is removed very quickly. Again from the Times article,
In interviews, some of the most prolific contributors about the Virginia Tech shootings said they were at a loss to explain how everything manages to come out as well as it does.
Emergence of order in a complex system--it does happen. Read on...
Miikka Ryokas, whose user name is Kizor and in an e-mail message said that he was a 22-year-old computer science student from Turku, Finland, wrote: “As the popular joke goes, ‘The problem with Wikipedia is that it only works in practice. In theory, it can never work.’ ”
Mr. Ryokas wrote that he had spent 15 hours on the article, mostly to “tag dubious information with ‘citation needed’ or remove it entirely” and to “restore valid information that is accidentally lost.”
“I get involved when a major tragedy strikes,” he wrote. “I may not be able to help the victims, but I can, and therefore must, do a small part in helping accurate information get through to the world.”
As unfamiliar as it may seem, the contributors insist there isn’t even a shadowy figure who becomes the mastermind of the process.
“People seem to self-assign,” said Natalie Erin Martin, 23, a history major at Antioch College in Ohio, who describes herself as “an obsessive copy editor and spellchecker.”
These few paragraphs perfectly encapsulate what is beneficial about this particular Wikipedia page, at least while the moment is fresh. There are people sitting on that site 15 hours a day obsessively checking and rechecking to make sure it is correct. They are right that there is no mastermind overseeing this--just like there is no mastermind ensuring that excess demand for July corn futures is constantly being driven toward zero. They are like arbitragers in a market, but their reward is non-pecuniary. It most certainly is an emergence of order in a complex system. I have to admire the concept. Not only that, but if you want to go to a site with over a hundred references to authoritative sources on the subject, Wikipedia is the way to go for this particular event.
And yet, one of the contributors interviewed by the Times makes my other point for me. He spends a lot of his time tagging and removing "dubious information." Certainly I would not take the text in the Wikipedia article (this one or anyone) as 100% unbiased, verified truth. I wouldn't accept the Wikipedia article itself as a source for a term paper. No journalist would use it as a source. That's not what it is there for.
But by the same token, I'll be a lot of journalists have looked at it. And a student doing a term paper on this event would be foolish not to use the list of references as a jumping off point for further serious research.
I like Wikipedia. I really do. I link to it once in a while, mostly for common knowledge that is available in a variety of sources but nicely organized on Wikipedia. I use it all the time as a search tool, but I don't believe anything I can't verify somewhere else.
It is extremely interesting to observe the way the contributors to Wikipedia have responded to this tragedy. This episode represents the best of what Wikipedia can be as well as the reasons to use it with caution.
Posted by William Polley at April 23, 2007 12:03 AM
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