The Six Sins of Wikipedia
From Sam Vaknin:
It is a question of time before the Wikipedia self-destructs and implodes. It poses such low barriers to entry (anyone can edit any number of its articles) that it is already attracting masses of teenagers as "contributors" and "editors", not to mention the less savory flotsam and jetsam of cyber-life. People who are regularly excluded or at least moderated in every other Internet community are welcomed, no questions asked, by this wannabe self-styled "encyclopedia"
Six cardinal (and, in the long-term, deadly) sins plague this online venture. What unites and underlies all its deficiencies is simple: Wikipedia dissembles about what it is and how it operates. It is a self-righteous confabulation and its success in deceiving the many attests not only to the gullibility of the vast majority of Netizens but to the PR savvy of its sleek and slick operators.
Vaknin's list of sins:
1. The Wikipedia is opaque and encourages recklessness.
2. The Wikipedia is anarchic, not democratic.
3. The Might is Right Editorial Principle.
4. Wikipedia is against real knowledge.
5. Wikipedia is not an encyclopedia.
6. The Wikipedia is rife with libel and violations of copyrights.
Read the full rant here.
We'd add a seventh sin:
7. Wikipedia does not know what Vaknin and Media Orchard know: that the key to Web traffic is numbered lists like this one.
posted by Scott Baradell at
10:52 AM
2 Comments:
Wikipedia may not know about lists, but this Wikipedia administrator knows that responding to an article with a big list using the writer's own list is an interesting way of defending his favourite project :-)
I dispute almost all of Sam Vaknin's assertions, so I drafted up a response and submitted it to the American Chronicle. They kindly published it under the title "Sinners and Saints: a response to Sam Vaknin's 'The Six Sins of the Wikipedia'".
My conclusion was that:
"almost all of Sam's comments are invalid, badly thought through or flatly wrong. Wikipedia is not opaque and does not encourage recklessness. Wikipedia is not an anarchy. Wikipedia does not lack quality control by design. Sam provides us with no evidence to back up his assertion that Wikipedia rewards quantity over quality, and he is unable to show how we are not an open source effort. Wikipedia, despite what Sam says, is an encyclopedia and this is backed up by the definitions contained in the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica, Microsoft's Encarta and the 6th edition of Columbia Encyclopedia. Further, Wikipedia does not make anyone use Wikipedia as their exclusive mode of research, and in fact encourages them to look elsewhere when doing research for university or school. Finally, Wikipedia deals with libel through the Wikimedia Foundation and Office Actions; it also has a designated agent who can deal with copyright issues, along with a mechanism for the community to catch copyright violations before it gets to that point."
By
Ta bu shi da yu, at 7/05/2006
I don't doubt that Sam is off. I would say that Wikipedia has had some problems in the past, which it seems to have been working hard to correct. That seems to be the way of Web 2.0; everything is always "beta," isn't it? Not necessarily a bad thing -- everything, and everyone, ALWAYS has room for improvement.
By
SB, at 7/05/2006
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