Let me begin by addressing one common statement. In any debate about Wikipedia, a defender says that anyone who doesn’t like what’s on the site should log on and change it. That’s kind of like saying that anyone who doesn’t like the Atlantic Ocean should take a bucket and drain it. The problem is too big for one person to fix at one sitting, or for one person to fix in a lifetime, or hundreds of people to fix in a lifetime. Moreover, any fix that I make is likely to be unfixed by the same doofus who posted the incorrect statement to begin with. More moreover, the problems are getting worse as time goes on, not better.
Now on to the case against Wikipedia.
Wikipedia if frequently inaccurate. It’s a basic fact. Earlier this year, when composer Maurice Jarre died, a student posted a completely bogus quote on his Wikipedia page. Editors removed it several times because it had no citation, but the student just reposted it until they allowed it to stay. Then newspapers around the world copied the quote. Read the whole story here.
It’s just common sense that if anyone can edit an article, wrong information will be posted on any topic where someone wants to mislead the public. Here’s a summary of a couple cases written by board user Blake:
I don’t think it can reasonably be believed that these are isolated incidents.
To touch briefly on the issue of citations, many Wikipedia articles have few or no citations. For example, try the articles about Maslow and Keats, which I link to below.
Wikipedia is badly written, badly organized, and inconsistent. An effective and memorable article has to be written by one person, or if written by several people it needs to be hammered into shape by a good editor. Wikipedia articles aren’t, and the result is usually junk.
Take a look at the article about Abraham Maslow. Everything is completely disorganized. A sentence about the date of his birth is in the fourth paragraph of “Biography”, not at the start as it should be. There’s this sentence: “His views throughout his career stemmed from his Orthodox Jewish Background.” Yet no attempt is made to support this sentence or connect it anything else. Some things are repeated two or three times, while other important facets of Maslow’s work are left out. And most of what’s in the “Biography” section is not even biography at all. Even as an introduction to Maslow, this article is worthless.
Wikipedia is also inconsistent, by which I mean that there’s no continuity between articles, even articles on related subjects. For example, the page about John Keats has only biography; it says nothing about his poetry. The page about T. S. Eliot is almost entirely about his poetry. There is no consistent standard about how much of a person’s page should be biography. How could there be, when there’s no authority that can create such a standard?
Wikipedia encourages intellectual laziness. Again, this flaw results naturally from the setup. By having a page about virtually anything and by being easy to navigate, Wikipedia is a natural choice for anyone who wants to find information quickly, especially for anyone who has low standards for intellectual content. Thus it leads people away from more rigorous content. Even worse, it leads people away from source material. Why bother reading The Winter’s Tale when you can just read the synopsis on Wikipedia?
Defenders will say that Wikipedia should only be the starting point for research on any topic. It’s a defensible idea in theory, but anyone who works with students knows that they use Wikipedia as a substitute for research, not a starting point for it.
Lastly there’s the claim that Wikipedia advances intellectual life just by making information available. Unfortunately the articles are so dry, dull, and humorless that it’s difficult to imagine anyone discovering the wonders of intellectualism by reading them.