Wikipedia has banned new articles from anonymous sources after a row over lies on its site, writes Jim Duffy
It has over one million articles in 82 languages, 632,319 registered editors, and gets 4,515 edits an hour. It is the 40th most visited site on the internet and has been mentioned in newspapers from the US to Nepal. It is banned in China, so afraid are the Chinese Communists of its influence. If you haven't heard of it, the chances are that your children have. For it is the internet phenomenon of the 2000s: Wikipedia, the world's biggest, and free, encyclopedia.
But it is no ordinary encyclopedia. For this one isn't written by academics but by ordinary people for ordinary people. It should be a dog's dinner, yet somehow it isn't, with its 600 or so core editors from around the globe, day and night, catching and deleting the rubbish, the vandalism, the made-up "facts".
Wikipedia was formed in January 2001 by Jimmy Wales, an American businessman who donated resources to launch the project. Perhaps its biggest success is the fact that it's live. Its record of world events can be updated by the minute, something that won it the attention of many newsrooms who found it a must-look-at source for the Columbia space shuttle disaster in 2003 and the death of Pope John Paul II last April. With anonymous experts among its contributors, it beat the newswires both for speed and background information on both occasions. (It had a full page on Benedict XVI up within minutes of his election.)
Part of its novelty is the anonymity of its contributors. Rumours claim that prominent academics and politicians have contributed. But so too have librarians, school-children and great-grannies. Its strength is in finding anonymous contributors who just happen to be experts on a topic, whether it's Coronation Street or the Tridentine Mass, medieval weaponry or The Simpsons. Its downside is that not every contributor is an expert. So while some articles far exceed anything in Encyclopedia Brittanica or World Book, others are of secondary-school essay level.
Wales's concept is that, with everyone editing everyone else's writings, the quality of each article would rise. But he makes no claims that Wikipedia is now a reliable sourcebook: "You should take Wikipedia with a grain of salt . . . [ it is a] work in progress . . . being written live."
In some ways Wikipedia looks like an embryonic society, with its own police (admins) who can ban vandals, judiciary (its Arbitration Committee), laws (the Manual of Style) and votes on a range of issues, eg what name to use in the event of disputes (the Derry/Londonderry problem has come up, naturally). And beneath it all is its central requirement: Neutral Point of View. Contributors "NPOV" articles and each other's contributions ruthlessly.
Its biggest threat however, is its very success. In May 2005 a vandal wrote on the biographical page about John Seigenthaler, a former aide and friend of Robert Kennedy: "For a brief time, he was thought to have been directly involved in the Kennedy assassinations of both John and his brother Bobby. Nothing was ever proven." It was complete fiction, but remained unnoticed for months. When he discovered it, Seigenthaler, a pallbearer at Robert Kennedy's funeral, wrote a scathing opinion piece in USA Today about what he called "internet character assassination". In response Wales has introduced a dramatic change in Wikipedia's editing procedure. Whereas before anyone could start an article, either as a signed-in user with a "usernic" (user nickname), or an anonymous user using their internet protocol number, Wales has restricted the starting of new pages to signed-in users, which will slow page creation and make it easier for committed users to keep up with and check new edits.
After five years of astonishing growth and praise, Wikipedia has found itself facing unprecedented scrutiny and criticism over the Seigenthaler affair. Wales's dream about creating a full open-edit encyclopedia remains the target. But how much the fallout from the Seigenthaler case damages it, or makes it the target for more vandalism, may well decide the future of what had up to now been perhaps the most remarkable internet achievement of the 21st century.
In the know What's Wikipedia?
http://en.wikipedia.org
Founded: January 15th, 2001
Running costs: $ million per year, all raised by donations; run on a non-profit basis by Wikipedia Foundation.
Irish articles: The Famine, President of Ireland, Taoiseach, Governor-General of the Irish Free State, U2, IRA, Irish Parliament House (Bank of Ireland), Dublin Castle, The Irish Times, the Freeman's Journal.
Most vandalised article: George W Bush