The Wikipedia's Effectiveness in Creating Public Knowledge

The Wikipedia’s founder Jimmy Wales acknowledged that the Wikipedia is "a work in progress" and will continue to evolve in order to deal with vandalism more effectively¹. A recent experts-led study by scientific journal, Nature.com, showed that the Wikipedia comes close to the Encyclopedia Britannica in terms of accuracy for its science-related entries². Research by Cosley et al. from the GroupLens research group at the University of Minnesota and the Human Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, has also shown that peer and expert oversight improves contributions by member-maintained communities³.

The commons-based peer production system which the Wikipedia adopts provides oversight. According to Halavais, all thirteen errors which he introduced were identified and corrected within hours⁴. Another study of online encyclopedias by graduate researcher William Emigh and Professor of Information Science, Susan Herring, both from the University of Indiana, Bloomington, concluded that post-production editorial control which the Wikipedia enables, results in the Wikipedia becoming more similar in quality to those found in traditional print encyclopedias⁵.

Despite the concerns regarding the value and credibility of the Wikipedia’s articles, the increasing influence and relevance of the information provided by the Wikipedia, together with the systematic advantages in information production afforded by the model of commons-based peer production which the Wikipedia adopts, have made the Wikipedia an effective tool which has empowered the public in its efforts to prevent the privatization of public knowledge, thereby reclaiming and expanding the commons.

Commons-based peer production | Compare the Wikipedia and the Encyclopedia Britannica Online | The Wikipedia

Vandalism on the Wikipedia | Misinformation on the Wikipedia | Can the Wikipedia be Trusted?

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¹ 'Wikipedia: "A Work in Progress."' BusinessWeekOnline. 14 December 2005. BusinessWeek. 14 February 2006.

² Giles, Jim. 'Internet Encyclopedias Go Head to Head.' News@Nature.com 14 December 2005. Nature Publishing Group. 4 February 2006

³ Cosley, Dan., et al. 'How Oversight Improves Member-Maintained Communities'. Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems. 2-7 April 2005. Portal The ACM Digital Library. Association for Computing Machinery. 26 January 2006.

⁴ Halavais, Alexander. "The Isuzu Experiment." a thaumaturgical compendium. 29 August 2004. School of Informatics, University at Buffalo, State University of New York. 21 February 2006.

⁵ Emigh, William and Susan C. Herring. 'Collaborative Authoring on the Web: A Genre Analysis of Online Encyclopedias'. Oct 22 Colloquium: Collaborative Knowledge Repositories. School of Library and Information Science, University of Indiana, Bloomington. 14 February 2006.