04.19
本文作者：小红猪小分队
Something’s happening at the heart of the world’s greatest encyclopedia that goes against its raison d’être – fixing it will take some radical moves
A nice idea, but crazy. It’ll never work. That’s how many people felt when Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger decided to create an encyclopedia that anyone could edit.
Those naysayers couldn’t have been more wrong. Wikipedia now contains 25 million entries in 285 languages, and almost half a billion people consult it every month. “It’s an astonishing contribution to our culture,” says David Weinberger at Harvard University, who studies the effect of technology on ideas and knowledge. Wales and Sanger’s utopian vision – to gather the world’s knowledge in one place and make it available to everyone on the planet – hasn’t seemed crazy for years.
But perhaps it should. Over the past few years, Wikipedia supporters have begun to warn that the encyclopedia’s future is under threat. Great swathes of human knowledge remain absent from Wikipedia, yet a cabal of editors is accused of resisting attempts to broaden the encyclopedia’s content. What’s more, new editors are not arriving at the rate they once did.
Wikipedia’s guardians are embarking on a slew of initiatives to tackle its failings. Yet some people are now questioning whether the encyclopedia’s workings could be fundamentally flawed. “I think the problems are irrevocable,” says Heather Ford at the Oxford Internet Institute in the UK. And if they are right, what happens next to Wikipedia could affect more than just the fate of the website: Google and Microsoft, for example, are hatching plans that are intertwined with those of the encyclopedia. Some believe it is time for bold changes, but to work they will have to involve a serious rethink of the way knowledge is compiled. Fixing the world’s greatest encyclopedia is not going to be easy.
Explore the data in our interactive graphic: “Wikipedia’s global breakdown“
It seems a long time since Wikipedia encountered its first potential stumbling block: ensuring accuracy. Around a decade ago, many doubted the site could ever rival a traditional encyclopedia. I had a personal role in challenging some of these perceptions. Together with a team of reporters at Nature, I compared the accuracy of Wikipedia entries with equivalent articles from Encyclopaedia Britannica. The exercise produced a surprising endorsement for Wikipedia. Almost all of the errors identified were minor, and although our fact-checkers found an average of about four generally trivial errors per Wikipedia entry, they identified about three in the Encyclopaedia Britannica versions.
Since then, editors have boosted Wikipedia’s reliability by insisting that articles contain better citations, and ending the ability of unregistered editors to create new entries. Yet these measures created fresh controversies – which were brought into focus by the story of a fictional superhero in Kenya.
In 2010, a group of Kenyan Wikipedia users tried to create an entry for Makmende, a hero with a headband and 1980s styling, who is widely known in Kenya. His moniker initially emerged as slang, thanks to the Clint Eastwood line “Go ahead, make my day”. The term was used to mock; someone attempting an overambitious task would be asked if they thought they were Makmende. Later, a local band made a video featuring Makmende and jokes were phoned-in to Kenyan radio stations. Yet attempts to create a Wikipedia entry were repeatedly rebuffed because, among other things, editors said the topic lacked notability.
This was odd, because Wikipedia is not exactly highbrow. A similarly frivolous meme, based around the US actor Chuck Norris, has been the subject of a Wikipedia entry since 2006. The Makmende entry was eventually allowed, but only after the controversy over its creation attracted attention outside Kenya. To many observers, it seemed that the article had been rejected not because the topic was insignificant, but because it meant nothing to the editors who do most of the work on the encyclopedia.
The most active editors live in the US and Europe (see interactive graphic), and this means the supposedly global project is skewed towards Western interests. According to a 2011 study by Mark Graham at the University of Oxford and colleagues, the snowy wastes of Antarctica have more articles dedicated to them than all but one of the countries in Africa. In fact, many African nations have fewer articles than the fictional realm of Middle Earth. These regions, notes Graham, are “virtual terra incognita”.
Then there is the gender issue. Around 90 per cent of Wikipedia editors are men, and it shows. In 2011, Shyong Lam of the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, and colleagues measured the length of around 6000 Wikipedia articles about movies. This is a good proxy for quality, since longer articles tend to be more thorough. Lam found that movies aimed at a more female audience tended to get short shrift. Relatively threadbare coverage of When Harry Met Sally is not a big issue, but Lam believes the problem is a wider one. Female editors tend to work on topics like the arts and philosophy, but their lower participation may be making these articles shorter than others.
These biases are serious, but they do not seem insurmountable. If Wikipedia needs to become more diverse, why not recruit editors from the missing demographics? That brings us to a third complaint made about the encyclopedia: that it is unwelcoming to newcomers. Many new editors find themselves deterred by the thicket of rules that govern the encyclopedia, a problem made worse by the brusque attitude of some experienced editors. Newbies often find that their contributions are removed – a change known as a “revert” – with no explanation.
These problems are one reason why the number of active editors on the English Wikipedia has been slowly declining since 2007, as has the rate at which editors are promoted to “admin” status, which brings greater power to police the encyclopedia.
This trend raises the possibility that Wikipedia’s position as a leading source of knowledge might not be as secure as it appears. It would be difficult for another resource to supplant Wikipedia, but not impossible. Sites that allow users to ask and answer questions are one potential rival. In South Korea, for example, a question-and-answer service hosted by local search engine Naver is more popular than Wikipedia, says Andrew Lih at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. And Quora, a similar service, has attracted millions of dollars from investors since it launched in 2010.
Yet making Wikipedia more welcoming is more complicated than it may seem, says Samuel Klein, an active editor since 2004 who is now a trustee of the Wikimedia Foundation, a San Francisco-based organisation that supports the running of the encyclopedia. Klein points out that the English Wikipedia is under constant attack from spammers and vandals, and sometimes well-meaning newcomers get caught in the crossfire.
There are tentative signs that Wikipedia can address some of these problems. In February 2012, for instance, editors launched Teahouse, an area of Wikipedia where newbies could ask questions that might, among a more experienced crowd of Wikipedians, seem stupid. Around 2000 questions were asked in the first year and those who visit the Teahouse go on to make nearly three times the number of edits as other newcomers, say the editors behind the project.
And in July, the site will launch a system that dispenses with the need to learn any markup, the computer code needed to make an edit. “It won’t solve all issues for new editors,” says Erik Möller, deputy director of the Wikimedia Foundation, “but it will solve the one issue we know that all editors are affected by.”
As for encouraging editors in developing nations, the foundation began in 2010 to try to persuade university lecturers in Brazil and Egypt to assign students tasks that involve creating or updating the encyclopedia. Möller also highlights an initiative called Wikipedia Zero that provides free access to Wikipedia for smartphone users in less-developed countries. So far, the scheme covers 12 nations, including Kenya and Thailand, and around 20 more countries are set to join.
Will these efforts be enough to create a truly global encyclopedia? Some Wikipedians think not. The reason, they say, is that no amount of new editors will be able to plug Wikipedia’s gaps until the rules that govern the encyclopedia are changed. Right from its early days, for example, contributors have been barred from adding their own theories. The rules also state that articles should cite sources such as an academic journal or newspaper.
For subjects that have not been well studied, or countries with limited online news sources, these can be impossible standards to meet. “There is no way the publishing industry in India or South Africa is going to do a 400-year catch-up,” says Achal Prabhala, a Bangalore-based writer and an adviser to the Wikimedia Foundation.
So in 2011, Prabhala began promoting a system that lets Wikipedia contributors do research themselves. As test cases, Prabhala and other Wikipedians from India and South Africa targeted a handful of local customs, including a religious ritual and a children’s game, that were not documented in Wikipedia. They interviewed participants, transcribed the conversations and cross-checked the accounts. The Wikipedia entries they created met with resistance almost immediately. “There was a bit of ganging up,” he says. “The bulk of the articles were removed.”
It was a scuffle that few outside Wikipedia noticed, but it captures what is perhaps the encyclopedia’s biggest dilemma. Almost everyone involved agrees that large chunks of the planet are poorly represented. Yet allowing editors to collect knowledge would “open up a can of worms”, says Weinberger. What happens, for example, when a disagreement occurs?
To assuage doubters, Prabhala has proposed a set of rules that would govern research by Wikipedians, from declaring their methods to emphasising discrepancies in their accounts. Yet that has not been enough. “I’m a huge fan of the idea,” says Lih. “But the project got stuck in the mud.” Prabhala hasn’t given up on the project, and says that his ideas have attracted interest from editors at Portuguese Wikipedia and elsewhere. But, he adds, there is little chance of them being adopted on the English version any time soon.
Ultimately, if Wikipedia’s coverage fails to expand, or the pace of updates slows, it is not only visitors to the encyclopedia’s website that will feel the effects. Over the past few years, Google and other search engines have begun to cull information from Wikipedia and present it to users alongside search results.
This service is the first manifestation of grander plans behind the scenes to assemble “knowledge graphs”: vast stores of data on hundreds of millions of people, places and other entities, as well as contextual information that describes how the entities are linked. The aim is to create a service that can answer your queries directly, or anticipate your needs, rather than giving you a hyperlink. A significant fraction of the companies’ knowledge graphs is taken directly from Wikipedia. So if the encyclopedia stutters, so will Google and Microsoft’s efforts.
Wikipedia was the place where the radical rethinking of the encyclopedia began. Yet its future may now be threatened by a strain of conservatism and parochialism that its early supporters frowned on in traditional publishing. If this were to lead to Wikipedia’s eventual decline as a cultural force, it would be an odd fate for a project once dubbed too crazy to work.
This article appeared in print under the headline “Wiki-opoly”
Wikipedia by numbers
1.29 billion Number of edits of Wikipedia, as of April 2012 (all languages)
91 per cent of Wikipedia editors are male
18.6 million registered editors
41,019,000 hours spent compiling English Wikipedia as of early 2012
12,000 hours spent compiling the first edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica
Jim Giles is a consultant for New Scientist
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