Cynical Nation

The New York Times is busting on Wikipedia for (get this!) "accuracy."

Now look, I'm quite sure there are errors and inaccuracies in Wikipedia, and I doubt that anyone who understands the project would ever believe otherwise. But how many errors and misrepresentations can be found in dead tree encyclopedias, or (God forbid) in mainstream news media like the New York Times?

Anyone who's ever been interviewed by the press no doubt understands first-hand the differences between what we say and what they write. Newspapers, however, are under a perpetual deadline of "now," and they have limited time and resources for copy-editing and fact-checking. Given their constraints, they do an admirable job -- but they are not to be taken as gospel.

In a similar vein, a friend of mine recently published an exhaustive, ground-breaking work on the history of violence (can there possibly be a richer vein of material to draw from?) His treatise was extensively researched and documented, the labor of many years, and was published by a very reputable publisher, and yet the final product, through copy editing errors alone, was fraught with enough factual errors to embarrass the author deeply.

In short, the NYT is right to advise a degree of skepticism when reading Wikipedia. But that's good advice for reading anything... including the New York Times.

There can be (and often are) inaccuracies in everything. So what's different about Wikipedia? I would submit there are two things.

1. People who are savvy enough to know about and read Wikipedia are likely to be savvy enough to understand that it's a work in progress, put in into proper perspective, and interpret what they read accordingly.
   
2. Any given entry will be seen by many thousands of different eyes, each set belonging to a potential fact checker and copy editor, thus making it highly likely that any such errors will be corrected. That's what the Open Source model is all about, and it's the reason that Linux still has fewer bugs than Windows, for example.
   

Bottom line: Wikipedia is not the end-all be-all dispositive, authoritative source, but neither is anything else. And for those of us who approach it as a work in progress, it continues to be a very convenient and useful information source.