I’m just catching up with the Seigenthaler-Wikipedia controversy, guess you can call this Wikipedia Critcal Thinking Exercise #2.

Growing up outside of Nashville I read Seigenthaler’s newspaper The Tennessean everyday. It was a good newspaper and Seigenthaler had an outstanding reputation in Tennessee as a journalist, civil rights activist, and founder of the First Amendment Center at Vanderbilt University. So, I was quite surprised to see the entries in my Blogline feeds that his bio in Wikipedia had been full of accusations that he had been involved in the Kennedy assasinations and lived in Communist Russia during the 70s. (Somehow, I often remember Seigenthaler appearing on Nashville TV during that time).

As background, if you’re down here in South America like me and don’t quite know what all the fuss is about, here’s is the essay that Seigenthaler wrote in USA Today where he exposed the false bio in Wikipedia. An updated article appeared yesterday in the London Times. To Wikipedia’s credit it has developed an article just on this controversy.

This is a fairly serious juncture for Wikipedia. A highly respected journalist, though not famous (well, maybe now more famous because his namesake son is a high profile TV newscaster), is the subject of an obviously false bio on Wikipedia. One of the hallmarks of Wikipedia is that editorial control rests in the hands of its users. Will that be able to continue with entries like these? Is that necessarily even the best thing for Wikipedia or should it’s defining criteria be that it is a freely accessible encyclopedia for the world that is credible? Think about it - those are two very different things.

Will Wikipedia eventually need a real editorial board to maintain its credibility? In Seigenthaler’s USA Today editorial he notes that Wikipedia operates with a budget of about one million dollars a year. I suspect most of that goes to pay technology costs, etc. But since Wikipedia has become such a large operation they could probably develop a non-profit business model that could support a paid editorial/research department. Make the goal of Wikipedia to be free, quality content and not just free, possibly accurate/possibly inaccurate, you decide/you edit content.

I want Wikipedia to exist. I think that it has great potential and that the world needs such a free resource. But, it cannot go on like this, with false information that just waits to be discovered eventually. I just don’t have confidence in Wikipedia as a reference resource. Fortunately, I’m intelligent enough to understand what I’m reading and to think about it rather than accepting it at face value. But, is everybody?

Let’s look at some of the discussins surrounding this controversy:

- A few people are saying that Seigenthaler, upon discovering the errors, should have just edited his own entry and solved the problem. Well, okay, but that’s an approach that argues that errors are inherent in the system and those errors will, optimistically, be fixed someday, by someone. I would like to believe in “Peace on Earth”, too, but I’m not quite optimistic about it.

- It’s simply the nature of the Internet that lies can be published online, that anyone can say anything. True, but a regular Web site or blog is different than a supposedly “trusted” (by many) source like Wikipedia. Again, this controversy shows the importance of educating people to think critically about any information resource.

- Charles Cooper at CNET poses some interesting questions on Wikipedia and the nature of truth: “On your ride home today, try pondering a future where Wikipedia’s model of competing versions of the truth becomes the norm. Will the increasing influence of the wisdom of the crowd force us to rethink the nature of knowledge? With the proliferation of the Internet, more voices inevitably will become part of that conversation.” I have to ponder that for a while, it sounds like a story topic for Borges (if he was still living).

- there’s the argument that wikipedia is a collaborative effort at knowledge, not truth. That makes for an interesting philosphical discussion but what about the teenager in Florida?

On the talk page at Wikipedia about Seigenthaler is an interesting statement by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales regarding the section that tracks the editorial history of a Wikipedia article: “working on the revision history, removing certain libellous revisions which were inadvertantly restored. I know some people have qualms about deleting history, but this is our policy and it should be carried out the same in this case as any other. Those concerned about the historical record should know that of course all the old revisions are stored in the database so in 100 years when historians want to study this incident, they can. It’s just that it would be deeply inappropriate (always) for us to keep revisions of those sort public.”

It will be interesting how historians analyze Wikipedia. Perhaps it will continue far into the future based purely by operating on the wisdom of the crowd, though a particular example involving lemmings does leap to mind. Perhaps a paid editorial/research team will be unnecessary as Wikipedia - over the years - figure out its strategy for editorial authority and credibility in a world where anyone can contribute. Perhaps the world will just learn to live with Wikipedia as a flawed resource. Afterall, democracies are flawed, even an idiot can be elected president. So, why make a big deal over a flawed, free encyclopedia?

Yet, I do believe a financial model can be established that would allow for a paid editorial/research staff while keeping Wikipedia as a free resource for the world. The editorial work could even be outsourced outside of the US to parts of the world where there are lot of highly educated, multilingual people who will work for very affordable wages. This model would not necessarily preclude the worldwide public from contributing to Wikipedia but could provide full-time editorial oversight. There are a lot of institutions that could finance such a venture and there are ways to build endowments to support operational expenses.

Wikipedia’s motto is that it’s the “free encylcopedia that anyone can edit”. Is it more important that Wikipedia be a free encylcopedia of good quality rather than an encyclopedia that anyone can edit?

Update The ever thoughtful Jon Udell identifies some technological ways for improving Wikipedia. Udell also points to an insightful essay by Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger, who predicted the very problems that Wikipedia is facing in “Why Wikipedia Must Jettison Its Anti-Elitism”.

It will be interesting to monitor Sanger’s new competition to Wikipedia, the Digital Universe, which will use a set of experts to review its articles.