Wikipedia + Jessica = love/hate

In Andrew Keen’s book (which I am still reading, not because I’m a slow reader, but because I’m trying to enjoy it), he talks a lot about Wikipedia. And why shouldn’t he? Everybody else is. I got an email from my eLearning professor about not using Wikipedia as a source, in her class or anyone else’s. Stephen Colbert is making up fake words about Wikipedia. Even old media are talking, like a 2006 New Yorker article. It’s almost impossible not to have an opinion of Wikipedia, no matter if you’ve never even used the Internet.

Last summer, at our family beach house, my grandmother (who has barely used a computer, let alone the Internet) wanted some information. My cousin, a web-savvy teenage boy, printed her a Wikipedia page.
“So it’s like an encyclopedia on the Internet,” she said.
He should have just nodded.
“It’s open source, anybody can edit it,” he said.
“So it’s fake?”
I tried to help.
“It’s democratized.”
I did not help. This was the beginning of my Wikipedia opinion, and at this point I was skeptical.

The arguing point here is reliability. This really is the thousand monkeys sitting at a thousand computers producing something that, while it may not be brilliant, is popular. According to Wikipedia’s Wikipedia page, the site receives between 10,000 and 30,000 page requests per second. Another Wikipedia page, titled “Reliability of Wikipedia” details tests done by third parties to assess the accuracy of Wikipedia. Newspapers and magazines have done numerous studies and assessments with various people to see really how reliable it is. Most of these tests found that it was reliable, however, it still doesn’t have much of an authority. Authority is connected to reliability, but isn’t the same. Jessica Clary saying that Wikipedia is possibly unreliable is one thing, but The New York Times saying the same thing is more significant, because The New York Times has more authority. It’s older. It’s bigger. It’s written and published more.

Then I read a lot of Wikipedia, and I started to like it. It was good for general information, and answering those tip-of-your-tongue questions. What was that TV show where Alan Ruck was a TV writer? Oh yeah, “Going Places.” What show was on before it? “Perfect Strangers.” When was it on? 9:30 p.m. on Friday night on ABC. This is information you couldn’t find in Encyclopedia Britannica.

But then I started using Wikipedia for other things. I wanted to write an essay about Cotard’s syndrome, and in class I was complaining that the Wikipedia page was lacking. I realized it wasn’t Wikipedia’s fault, but mine. I did a search of Google Scholar (Google’s search engine for scholarly papers and journal articles) and found plenty of information. This is the type of thing Wikipedia isn’t good for.

I agree with my eLearning professor that Wikipeda should not be used as source material in academic work, not because of its peer-editing system, but because it’s too generalized, just like any encyclopedia. It’s good for background information or pop-culture trivia, but not for real research. This brought me into my phase of loving Wikipedia. Because I knew what it was good for, I used it constantly to solve the pop-culture questions I got in my head. What’s that song in the new Jetta commercial? Oh it’s the Silversun Pickups song “Kissing Families.” Where are the Silversun Pickups from? Silver Lake in Los Angeles. What other bands are from there? Rilo Kiley and Elliott Smith. Who’s that guy in Rilo Kiley that was a child actor? Blake Sennett. Wikipedia reading flows like a choose-your-own-adventure book. This was the height of my love affair. Then things started to go downhill.

The New Yorker’s article on Wikipedia was published July 31, 2006 and featured a prominent Wikipedia user known as Essjay. The New Yorker article said that Essjay has a Ph.D. in theology and a degree in canon law had contributed to sixteen thousand entries. Essjay served terms as chair of the Wikipedia mediation committee and edits articles patiently for errors and obscenities. This Essjay person sounds like your model Wikipedia contributor. Well, good for him, because he’s fake. Essjay is a persona developed by a 24-year-old named Ryan Jordan. In March 2007, Essjay’s persona was revealed, and Essjay retired from the site. Keen devotes two pages in his book to Essjay. Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia’s founder, is okay with it. He told The New Yorker that he regards the Essjay name as “a pseudonym and I don’t really have a problem with it.”

So where does that fall? In the realm of reliability, sure, Ryan Jordan’s contributions to Wikipedia were factually accurate. But what kind of authority do they have? Not much. Essjay’s degrees are made up, and have no basis, so they don’t have much authority.

The scary thing here is that we may be entering a period of time where informational authority doesn’t matter. This would be the real heartbreaker. If informational authority means nothing, then why am I working for my MFA degree? Why are people working for any sort of advanced degree? If Dr. Harvard Professor and Ryan from Kentucky are considered equally knowledgeable, what’s the point? And if that dividion is erased in fields of research and writing and journalism, what’s next? Will the guy operating on me be a real MD, or just some guy that knows a lot about surgery? Yes, it’s an extreme example, but think about it. What's information worth if authority is passé?