Why Wikipedia will never reach quality

Update: I must admit Wikipedia accepted an external link to this article even if it was posted by an anonymous contributor, see here.

Wikipedia is a revolution. The Encyclopedia is really a huge benefit for everyone. This is a fact and I think no one contest it. But (yes there is a “but”), I agree with the opinion of one of its co-founders (Larry Sanger) as for the fact that Wikipedia will never reach the quality that we expect from such encyclopedia.

As I was explaining it in my previous article about the users of the new web 2.0 applications, the new face of the Internet is to allow everyone to participate, contribute and share ideas and opinions. Wikipedia is for sure in line with this philosophy and was probably one of the first.

I tried Wikipedia. I created an account and tried to contribute on subjects that I appreciate. I wanted to bring my contribution to the world’s knowledge.

First I wrote about a video game over an article that was only a starting draft. No problem with that as I knew very well the game and nothing was written about it. So my text stayed for a long time and is still quite the same as when I posted it.

Now I went through over heavy articles relating history, famous man or political subjects. Now I must admit that the souvenir of that experience made me never come back again on wikipedia (to contribute). I found lots of little that I was considering as either mistakes or even worst subjective point of vues that obviously take part of a certain opinion and this as nothing to do in an encyclopedia article. The main problem you’re facing to is that you’re quickly considered as a newbie because you never did contribute so much and that date you join is publicly available so I was clearly identified as a newbie.

When you are a newbie on the Internet within a website community (whatever the website), you are first looked at as a spammer or someone who’s first goal is to interfere. So in that context every single change or contribution you make on an article is removed whatever the quality of your work. It’s like people who has more contributed than you before should always have the last word.

On Wikipedia it is always a question of who is right and who is wrong. It often leads to disputes. Wikipedia has a “dispute resolution process”. It is basically going through several steps:

1. Try to solve the issue privately with the other party
2. Ask the community
3. Conduct a survey
4. Mediation
5. Arbitration

The problem is that we don’t really know how users are elected to the “Mediation committee” for instance. Wikipedia says “Members are selected by consensus of the Mediation Committee as a whole“.

Finally even through all these steps, to be recognized as the one being right, you need to be legitimated by some criteria. And on the Internet these criteria are highly criticizable to my mind. As I already exposed it in a previous article “Web 2.0 is led by technology geeks” :

“Of course anyone can argue against the social networking websites as we would do it with the representatives of a democracy who usually do not come from the same social level than “the people”. The difference here is that being legitimate on the Internet is not based on the same process than for politics. You become an important member and thus your vote or contribution have a better weight if you are an active member. To reach the top members list you “just” need to contribute, vote or comment a lot more frequently than the average. This fact gives an advantage to the ones that have enough time to spend on the Internet. But more important the promotion is not based on any knowledge, competence or diploma and that makes a huge difference with the way democracy works in modern democracy governments.“

This way of considering the governance over a community of people is referred to as “populism” which can be defined -By Wikipedia :)- as “a political doctrine or philosophy that aims to defend the interests of the common people against an entrenched, self-serving or corrupt elite“.

It is also generally admitted that when you have no one that finally take the responsibility to decide and make a choice then nothing happens. You end up with a stagnant situation where you always stay on old positions. And that’s exactly what usually happens on Wikipedia (at least for articles that have reached a “mature” state). Of course you could use the “dispute resolution” process but it is a very long and hard work that needs time and thus it is contrary to what Wikipedia claims (anyone can edit !).

If you had to transpose this conception of the governance to our modern democracies that would bring us back to episodes of those countries past history. Usually in a situation where everyone want to impose it’s point of view you end up with some people that are louder or have more charisma than the others. It simply led to what is know as “representative democracies” where you elect people to decide for you because you think there are able to support your ideas and have the competency for that.

So now if we get back to the Social network website principles, the next step would be for the users to “elect” the moderator users so that they decide for them. For Wikipedia that would be to elect the representatives based on a campaign where the people that want to be elected needs to present their ideas, their project for the future of wikipedia, etc. We’re not talking about mediators that elect themselves together but representative that are elected by everyone and that will have certain power to decide. It could be also to elect people for certain topics, or maybe representative could have the power to nominate people responsible for certain topics. Rules and roles have to be defined of course.

Wikipedia can have a great future if it evolves correctly towards reasonable proven principles and not towards “populism”.

To conclude let me recall a famous sentence that summarizes it all. It was pronounced by the famous French humorist named Coluche:

“Just because there are so many of them being wrong doesn’t mean they’re right“