Wikipedia is an online collaborative effort where anyone can edit articles to create a resource where “every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge”. Wikipedia has always had problems but as time goes on these issues are getting more important – even dangerous - because Wikipedia dominates Google’s search results.
About Wikipedia
Wikipedia was launched January of 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger as part of Bomis – an Open Directory clone, web ring and porn site - as an offshoot of the Nupedia Project. Nupedia was a peer-reviewed online encyclopedia made up by qualified contributors. The problem with Nupedia was the time to launch new articles. Programmer Ben Kovitz suggested using a wiki format to speed up the process. This new format would be less formal than the original Nupedia project.
In June of 2003, Wikipedia moved under the new Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit company whose vision is “to bring a free and accurate encyclopedia to every single person on the planet”. The Wikimedia Foundation now hosts several other open wiki projects including a dictionary and thesaurus. Wikimedia has less than 10 employees with the majority of work completed by volunteers.
Wikipedia is now in 100 languages and boasts more than 5,300,000 articles with over 75,000 active contributors.
Wikipedia: All the knowledge you wish you knew if it were true
Wikipedia has attracted media attention for various controversies. While generally quick to address these concerns some issues remain, many at the core of what Wikipedia actually is.
Lack of Authority
Because Wikipedia is open, anyone can edit any entry. Articles are written and edited by non-credentialed “experts”. Articles are open for attack (vandalism) and often the articles fail to cite sources or they cite sources that are not the best available.
Wikipedia inaccuracies are cited on many authoritative websites like answers.com. Having Wikipedia content on these sites adds credibility to false information.
Wikipedia has problems with disproportionate reporting and quality. Current events are covered in detail while important historical and scientific information does not get the coverage deserved. Some topics contain only “stubs” or brief definitions of the topic with incomplete content. Because the contributors to Wikipedia are not necessarily experts, the information presented may be out of context misleading the reader.
Wikipedia content is slanted because it can only be created by people that have the time, care about the topic and understand how to operate within the Wikipedia technical and cultural rules. Opposing viewpoints by people too busy or apathetic are not included.
Wikipedia articles change over time. An article you link to may be the target of vandalism or in the process of a rewrite. If you cite a Wikipedia article, that page may change and the citation will not make sense!
No Accountability
In addition to the lack of authority, Wikipedia also faces the issue of lack of accountability. This issue is a ticking bomb with two parts:
1. Anonymous Editing
Anyone can edit an existing entry on Wikipedia. This has led to several scandals including vandalism and hoaxes that could be liable. According to Jason Scott of textfiles.com, the entry for George W. Bush spends 80% of its time a victim of vandalism. While membership is required to start a new article, anonymous users can edit existing entries without logging in. In place of a member ID the user’s IP address is logged. IP logging is an extremely limited security measure easily countered with a proxy server that redirects your IP with another one that is difficult to trace.
2. Legal Issues
The content on Wikipedia falls into a legal gray area in which the courts may eventually create legislation that affects a broad range of websites, especially those that rely on user-generated content.
The problem is that subjects of articles may resent the information posted about them. That information may be false for various reasons including vandalism and human error. Because the content of Wikipedia is aggregated on several authority websites, it is often assumed fact. Living down a bad biography may be difficult to do.
In the case of vandalism who is to blame for bad information? The person that posted bad content or Wikipedia? Consider that Wikipedia allows anonymous editing and that even members can hide behind screen names – sometimes multiple screen names - making them difficult to track down. In addition, Wikipedia appeals to an international audience so even if the person behind the attack is discovered they may be beyond the reach of domestic legal action. The law is unclear on whether Wikipedia itself is actionable in these cases or not.
Wikipedia has a policy of correcting libelous articles. Wikipedia has put in systems for detecting vandalism through both automated and human methods but some bad posts have taken months to catch and correct. An error on Hillary Clinton’s biography was not discovered for 20 months. During that time over 4,000 other edits were made to her biography!
Even Wikipedia’s own internal tests have proven the system for catching errors is lacking. Individuals are not supposed to edit content about them as it violates the Wikipedia “neutral point of view” rule that is supposed to ensure articles are balanced.
Wikipedia has a problem with copyright laws. Wikipedia Watch estimates as much as 2% of all Wikipedia information is plagiarized. Wikipedia Founder Jimmy Wales has admitted many of the images on Wikipedia have been incorrectly labeled “fair use”. Unfortunately, Wikipedia does not have any active programs for discovering and removing illegal content.
People who request removal of their biographies are often denied. The oddest case of this is perhaps that of Daniel Brandt a former member of the Wikipedia Foundation’s Board of Trustees who requested his biography be removed several times with no result. If this is how Wikipedia treats its own contributors, how do they treat outsiders without influence in the Wikipedia system?
In a CNN interview John Seigenthaler, a writer and journalist, raised the issue of increased government regulation online based on his own experience with vandalism on his Wikipedia biography.
“Can I just say where I’m worried about this leading. Next year we go into an election year. Every politician is going to find himself or herself subjected to the same sort of outrageous commentary that hit me, and hits others. I’m afraid we’re going to get regulated media as a result of that. And I, I tell you, I think if you can’t fix it, both fix the history as well as the biography pages, I think it’s going to be in real trouble, and we’re going to have to be fighting to keep the government from regulating you.”
Wikipedia mirror sites can hold deleted or altered articles in public view making removal of false information even more difficult.
Google: Popularity over quality
Google has a special relationship with Wikipedia that placed Wikipedia results in the “one box” integrated results above the organic search results. Google recently shifted the Wikipedia results from the one box to the first position in the organic results.
Why does Google lean on Wikipedia so much? This makes some sense when you compare Wikipedia’s vision to bring a free and accurate encyclopedia to every single person on the planet with Google’s mission to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. Wikipedia contains a lot of free information and Google provides a lot of viewers – over half of internet users worldwide use Google for their search.
Where things get confusing is Google’s premise of relevance. Wikipedia admits that they are not to be taken as an authority despite the title of “encyclopedia”. They claim instead that Wikipedia articles should be used as an overview or starting point for research.
By its own rules, Wikipedia does not create original content instead relying on content cited from other sources. The issue of reliance gets more confusing as Google has been diligently working to remove competing search results from their results under the guise of relevance. Since Wikipedia is another intermediary that passes viewers to more relevant source documents Google’s stance on this issue is a bit fuzzy.
Perhaps Wikipedia is the new DMOZ for Google. DMOZ, also known as the Open Directory Project is a human-edited directory of websites. Google has shown a lot of faith in DMOZ, cloning the ODP for its own Google Directory and sometimes using the descriptions DMOZ editors assign to websites in the search results pages instead of the descriptions websites set for themselves.
DMOZ has fallen victim to alleged corruption along with internal problems and was shut down for several months. It has since reopened but the faith in DMOZ seems to be broken by the internet population and Google.
Whatever the reasons are for Google’s reliance on Wikipedia, it does point out a fatal flaw in the Google system: popularity over correctness. People familiar with how Google works understand how important backlinks are as a voting mechanism. The websites with the most links get to the top of the search results even if their content is not the best. That same philosophy of determining relevance by popularity is also seen by promoting Wikipedia even though the information is unreliable.
More special treatment by Google for Wikipedia is noted by Tom C on YOUmoz and Russ Jones notes that 96.6% of Wikipedia Pages Rank in Google’s Top 10.
Google’s special treatment of Wikipedia is likely coming to an end but there are reasons Wikipedia has traditionally done well in Google’s organic results.
Wikipedia’s site structure makes the site easy to crawl for Google’s bots. There is plenty of cross-linking between articles with keywords used in the anchor text. Wikipedia nofollows external links boosting their internal PR flow. The one box placement helped Wikipedia get media attention and more backlinks.
Finally, Wikipedia handles detractors by naming their websites as “uncredible” which disqualifies those sites from being listed in Wikipedia, limiting their exposure. In instances where ignoring those sites is not feasible Wikipedia often lists unanchored text URLs instead of directly linking to the sites in question.
The next evolution of Wiki: Search
Jimmy Wales has announced a search engine as part of the Wikia initiative. Wikia is a for-profit company that Wales leads and is technically not associated with Wikipedia though a lot of the talent overlaps. The Wikia search engine would be in direct competition with Google and assumedly be the default search engine for Wikipedia, or at least gain significant exposure through the Wikipedia community.
Wikia search will be open source with the algorithm freely available for all to see. Google gained a lot of its initial traction by appealing to the open source community.
Conclusion
The Wikipedia concept is ambitious and idealistic. Wikipedia contributors follow a noble pursuit and work hard to make sure the best possible information is presented. The culture and infighting within the Wikipedia community speaks volumes about the passion of the editors.
Unfortunately, that does not solve the problems Wikipedia faces or make the content worthy of its current standing in our global internet culture. Wikipedia is exactly as it claims to be if you look at their disclaimers: a great place to start your research or get a general overview of a topic but not the same caliber resource expected from an encyclopedia.
The best practice for dealing with Wikipedia is to keep it in perspective. The information there is just as good as the information you get from your neighbors. They may be brilliant nuclear physicists or just full of crap – you just don’t know without doing a bit of real research on your own.
Resources:
Posted in SEOs, Reviews, Industry News, SEO
2 Comments »
First, a note of congratulations to my friend Donna. Donna has been a wealth of inspiration and knowledge in the forums for years. She helped me get started with SEO and for that I will always be grateful. One of her latest ventures is