Our Wiki, Wiki ways, beautiful in imperfection

Illustration: Eric Lobbecke

BOTCHING the words of The Star-Spangled Banner is not a good look when it's in front of more than 100 million Americans.

Singer Christina Aguilera blamed her error at this month's televised Super Bowl on excessive emotion. The blogosphere had a different view, suggesting she got the words wrong because she took them from Wikipedia before they were corrected - confirmation for some that the free online encyclopedia cannot be trusted.

The reference site that has transformed access to information in the past decade can claim an error rate not much worse than that repository of fact, the Encyclopedia Britannica. But caught out is caught out and, this time, near enough was not quite good enough. Yet the real story may not be that Wiki gets it wrong sometimes but that so many of us are hooked on the site. Last month, the Pew Research Centre in the US reported that in the three years to May last year, the percentage of American internet users who referred to Wikipedia rose from 36 per cent to 53 per cent. That translates to 42 per cent of all American adults, compared with 25 per cent in 2007. Who would have thought when Jimmy Wales launched his site in January 2001 that it would become the go-to spot for everyone from pop singers to journalists, and from researchers to students and men arguing over whether the Grateful Dead performed on the Saturday or the Sunday at Woodstock.

But there it is, a digital phenomenon that would appear to prove Wales's guiding mantra: that an open market trumps central planning in knowledge, just as it does in economics.

FEED "Jimmy Wales and Friedrich Hayek" into Google in a single search and you will get more than 3000 mentions. The story of how Hayek's 1945 paper, The Use of Knowledge in Society, was the genesis for Wiki is all over the web. It is now taken as fact that Wales built on Hayek's argument that knowledge is dispersed and that a central planner - say, the editorial board behind an encyclopedia - can't compete with an open-market in truth that draws on diverse networks of contributors. A reference tool edited by the crowd rather than the experts was alarming a decade ago. Journalists and students alike were warned off using the site and a generation reliant on the printed word could not countenance that Wikipedia could be taken seriously. How we have changed. Consulting Wikipedia is routine for media and researchers and just about anyone who needs to find something in a hurry. In this newspaper office it appears regularly on computer screens.

Michael Gawenda, a former editor of The Age and now a media academic, says Wikipedia is a "fabulous" resource. "I use it and I am sure most journalists use it but I still have doubts about how accurate it is across everything that is published. I would be very concerned if editors or journalists were not backing it up with another source."

Gawenda thinks Wikipedia is becoming more accurate, but that time-poor journalists are also changing their approach. "Some editors, especially of websites, worry less about accuracy because they argue that it can be corrected later," he says. But it's not just in the media that we are seeing a cultural shift around veracity.

"There's this feeling that somehow it doesn't matter [whether it is wrong or right] because everything is contestable and will be contested," says Gawenda, who notes journalists have always had to be mindful of unreliable sources.

"We used to rely for background on cuttings from our own papers," he says. "That presupposed that it was all accurate, but things that were not true became true because they were repeated."

The volume of material on Wiki is the pay-off, according to University of Tasmania philosopher David Coady.

"One of the striking things about Wikipedia is that while it might have more errors than an encyclopedia it has got some tens of times as many entries and that's a price worth paying." Wikipedia claims it has 17 million entries, of which 3.5 million are in English. The Britannica has about 40 million words covering about 500,000 topics.

Coady, whose forthcoming book, Applied Epistemology, includes material on Wikipedia, says the pursuit of knowledge should not be driven only by a desire to avoid errors but also by a desire to acquire truths.

"A lot of critics assume that people have a passive relationship with the material but the mere fact there are false reports doesn't mean there are false beliefs," he says. "One of the great things about Wikipedia is that there is a virtual paper trail of how it is put together, so people can go back and look at this and make their own judgments."

Coady's most memorable Wikipedia moment was when a student cited it as a source and, when challenged, admitted that he had written the original entry he was referencing.

Still, Coady warns against an "epistemic panic" - the fear Wikipedia will breed a population vulnerable to fibs: "When printing began some people started worrying that people would believe things that were not true. That seems quaint to us now but people will look back on our approach to Wikipedia and think that we were quaint as well."

Wikipedia sifts the generations. Market researcher Neer Korn says young people like to go right to the source and Wikipedia meets that demand. Last year, a survey found the average age of Wiki readers was 25.

Oliver Hartwich, an economist with the Centre for Independent Studies, says he uses Wikipedia as he once used encyclopedias, as a starting point. Hartwich appreciates the Hayekian aspect of Wikipedia and says ideally there would be more contributors because if there is bias, it happens because "not everyone is a contributor".

IF you are a popular culture nut, Wiki is nirvana, in part because there are so many male contributors. That's the other dirty little secret: only 13 per cent of contributors are women. As Noam Cohen wrote in The New York Times last month, Wikipedia is part of the "obsessive, fact-loving realm that is dominated by men". Whatever the reasons, the result, Cohen notes, is that Manolo Blahnik and Jimmy Choo get a handful of paragraphs while there are 45 articles on characters in The Simpsons. The critics worry about such skew but the bigger issue is what happens to objective truth when consensus is the goal. Measuring the site's accuracy is fraught: in 2005, the journal Nature said Wiki's scientific articles came close to the level of accuracy in the Encyclopedia Britannica and had a similar rate of serious errors. The study was disputed by the encyclopedia.

Medical and scientific information is another area of concern as professionals worry about self-diagnosis. Wikipedia says reviewers in fields such as "toxicology, cancer research and drug information reviewing Wikipedia against professional and peer-reviewed sources found that [its] depth and coverage were of a very high standard".

But it noted entries were vulnerable to "public relations" people who removed adverse product information.

The Hayek thesis goes only so far: Wikipedia lacks the price signals needed for a perfect market.

Still, with a million editors - defined as those who have made at least five edits - according to Wales (who has said about half the edits by logged-in users are made by 2.5 per cent of logged-in users) it somehow seems to work. Not perfect, but damn useful.