considering Wikipedia

In between learning about kernel methods and other maths, I've found the time to talk to a couple other grad students about random topics, and one that came up was Wikipedia. In the past decade of the internet explosion, a couple tools have helped the common man navigate his way around the enormous space of the www. It seems as if out of these tools, google, youtube, facebook and wikipedia have come out on top as being the tools someone cannot navigate the internet without.

So...each has its issues. facebook sells your info to advertisers, google's power is nearly limitless (kind of scary), and youtube...well, it mostly just wastes my time with its addictive distractions. I learned a little more about the structure of wikipedia, however, and it bothers me a little more.

The publicly editable encyclopedia Wikipedia is not entirely free-form - the reason it isn't chaos is due to the administrators of Wikipedia, the people in charge of rules of posting, deletion, etc. Consider now the position of these people - due to the huge popularity of Wikipedia, it's almost a first source for anyone who wants to learn about some subject. Yet, administrating Wikipedia is not an official job, there are no enforceable laws and regulations concerning the information that goes out, and most of it is done anonymously. Add to the fact that the average age of a Wikipedia admin is 17 (with estimates that go as low as 15), and you have a lot of power and influence in the hands of a few people who aren't held responsible for it (and if they were, would you really be able to press serious charges against a 17 year old?).

To put it into perspective, consider that there are roughly 1000 administrators of Wikipedia. There are about 7 million articles and 2 million subscribed viewers, so it's difficult to estimate how many people actually use Wikipedia for anything, but it's got to be approaching a hundred million at least. What they write influences the way people think, and can have serious consequences for corporations and public figures (and these are 17 year old students - implying a certain level of bias and immaturity in opinion).

Not that I'm anti-liberal or anything, but Wikipedia will definitely lean towards a more liberal view of things considering the opinion trend of the age group of Wikipedia's admins. Compound this with the fact that the internet generation's way of thinking and forming opinions (http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200807/google), and you have a dangerous combination: power to influence the way people think in the hands of a few people who don't think very deeply themselves. The most attractive meme or idea out there (regardless of how accurate or trustworthy it is) can then be easily sold to the general public. And thus bad (or at least biased) ideas enter the public sphere, and can keep people from objectively evaluating things.

Note: The information in the articles below on Slimvirgin, a Wikipedia admin, may be wrong. The article claims she wrote a forum post encouraging skewed articles in favor of animal rights. She responded to me and notified me that the post as quoted is a fake. I'll remove it from this blog post; the main idea stands without it. If it was a fake, I apologize for spreading false information.

What's worse, a CalTech grad student traced a bunch of Wikipedia changes concerning corporations or business to the same or rival corporations/businesses.

"A new data-mining service launched Monday traces millions of Wikipedia entries to their corporate sources, and for the first time puts comprehensive data behind longstanding suspicions of manipulation, which until now have surfaced only piecemeal in investigations of specific allegations."

A silver lining: most of the science and math articles tend to be politically unbiased (if you find one that's not, tell me =P), so the admins tend to leave those alone for the mathematicians and researchers to maintain. But be careful on everything else you read - it is probably a little biased (usually away from the conservative orthodox side too) and can sometimes be outright misleading and wrong.

A few interesting articles related
http://www.wired.com/politics/onlinerights/news/2007/08/wiki_tracker
http://www.searchengineguide.com/ross-dunn/is-wikipedia-co.php