The Real Function of Wikipedia In A Google World

2007.01.26   prev     next

GOOGLE and Wikipedia represent two very different techniques to make quality information available to the public on the internet:

• Google — People everywhere create information in the form of webpages. A large percentage of those webpages are uninformative junk or worse, but a small percentage of them contain high-quality information about various topics. People tend to link their sites to other sites on which they found something helpful. Google uses this linking tendency to rank webpages, and serves highly ranked pages near the top of its search results.
• Wikipedia — People everywhere are permitted to edit this online reference. Some users will post unhelpful or low-quality content, or even intentionally vandalize the encyclopedia, but those person’s actions can be reversed or corrected by other, well-meaning users, who likely will devote far more time and effort (as compared to vandals) to keeping up the quality of Wikipedia’s content. When repairing vandalism is as simple as clicking “Undo,” vandals become frustrated by the ease and speed with which their damage is completely reversed.

These two plans are intended to work automatically; i.e. without massive, administrator oversight of the system. Both Google and Wikipedia do have some administrative regulation, but for the most part they don’t rely on it and seem to be working just fine.

But there’s a not-so-obvious problem in Wikipedia, from which the Google approach does not suffer. In Wikipedia, content can be changed, deleted, or undone by people who pretend to be helpful participants in the process, but are actually just a different kind of vandal: people on a power trip, to make sure that certain views or persons are not heard, or just to delete whatever they can for malicious satisfaction. This kind of vandalism cannot be seen or easily controlled. Take a casual trip through Wikipedia, searching for a few random subjects, and you won’t see anything that obviously looks like vandalism. But vandalism may be present nonetheless.

With the Google approach, two different persons can each make a website about, say, the industrial revolution, and if each site is well-received, then both will show up on a Google search, even though the authors might have significantly different visions of how the industrial revolution should be explained. One or both of these authors might want to take down the other’s page, but cannot.

On Wikipedia, this talk-and-let-talk harmony is simply not possible. Only one person can emerge victorious from a conflict over what should be in a Wikipedia article, and that will be the one who has the time and determination to win a post-delete-post-delete battle, while condescendingly accusing the other of inappropriate behavior.

And that’s merely what happens when two well-meaning contributors disagree about content. What happens if a contributor isn’t well-meaning, but pretends to be? I’ve had some disheartening experiences where I posted very carefully written paragraphs to Wikipedia that I thought would be completely accepted — even protected — by the dedicated content watchers, only to see them erased immediately for the flimsiest of reasons. And recently, a user — who in his own profile admits that deleting material is his primary activity on Wikipedia — examined an “External links” link to a well-written, information tutorial in my webspace. By backing out the URL to just my domain name, he found my blog. The blog was never linked from Wikipedia, but no matter — he then proceeded to search the entire Wikipedia for any link to any page in my domain, and killed every one with no explanation but this: “rv blog” (I’m guessing that “rv” means “removed vandalism.”)

Wikipedia’s self-regulating system of vandalism control is effective only at keeping the encyclopedia non-vandalized-looking to the casual reader. But the web+Google approach is truly vandalism free. In many ways, Wikipedia resembles an old-fashioned kingdom where only those who dedicate their lives to power struggles in the royal castle — and win those struggles — can hope to communicate freely with the mass public, without being forcibly silenced when their speech contradicts those in power. Google, by contrast, is like a modern democracy with freedom-of-speech as a primary foundation of law.

And one of the beauties of Google is that it includes Wikipedia! Google a topic, and you’ll get the best the web has to offer, even if that’s a Wikipedia page (which it often is). I myself read Wikipedia a lot — but almost always as a result of being directed there by a Google results page.

Conclusion

Wikipedia serves two valuable functions on the web:

• to provide more fodder for Google, and
• to satisfy some small percentage of internet users who feel uncomfortable with any information source that doesn’t consistently present the look and the writing style of a typical, hardback encyclopedia.

I think Wikipedia will always be with us. But so will Google, and Google will always be the better way to find quality information on the web.

See also: Google and Wikipedia, Revisited

Update 2009.06.30 — “Study concludes Wikipedians are a bunch of grumpy introverts”. Why am I not surprised?

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