Reliability Depends on Responsibility: The Wikipedia Experiment Is A Failure If Reliably Correct Information Is The Goal

A paper based reference work was judged to be good or bad on the basis of the control of its contents for accuracy and reasonable objectivity.  That was especially true of general encyclopedias whose stock and trade was accuracy and lack of bias.  They depended on named authors and editors, either named or known to the publishers and general editor.  They stood by the work of their authors and editors, the reputation of their encyclopedia rose or fell on the quality of their work and its objectivity, their own reputations depended on that.   You don't get that with Wikipedia and, after a dozen years, it is not only of wildly variable reliability, it is openly the focus of groups intent to have it biased in favor of their ideologies and open to the biased "editing" of pressure groups, political, religious, anti-religious and all other possible types of efforts.  If one ideological faction can boast of their success in turning Wikipedia to their own ends, they announce that possibility to all others.  If the group is large enough, focused enough and dedicated enough to their ideology, then they can definitely swamp anyone who attempts to correct or re-balance articles they have slanted to their liking.

I have not seen any real and effective effort by those with control of Wikipedia to prevent this kind of thing. I don't believe with something as massive as Wikipedia that would be possible, it is certainly not possible given the way it is set up and was generated.  No one seems to be ultimately responsible for the reliability of Wikipedia and the unsurprising result is that its quality is not reliable.   That is due to the denial of responsibility built into the thing.  I'd call it an effort but that complete disavowal of responsibility makes that word inappropriate.

If you criticize Wikipedia online, one thing you are likely get is a citation of the 2005 article in Nature which compared the accuracy of Wikipedia articles about science with the Encyclopedia Britannica.   While I will note that was well before the ideological group of "editors" I will focus on arose, the article itself was hardly a ringing endorsement of Wikipedia.  Here is how it is described in Wikipedia, itself.   As of today, at least:

Articles for traditional encyclopedias such as Encyclopædia Britannica are carefully and deliberately written by named experts, lending such encyclopedias a reputation for accuracy. Conversely, Wikipedia is often cited for factual inaccuracies and misrepresentations. However, a non-scientific report in the journal Nature in 2005 suggested that for some scientific articles Wikipedia came close to the level of accuracy of Encyclopædia Britannica and had a similar rate of "serious errors."[21] These claims have been disputed by, among others, Encyclopædia Britannica.[22][159] Although Nature gave a point by point rebuttal of Britannica's argument,[23] the Nature report did agree that the structure of Wikipedia's articles was often poor.

As a consequence of the open structure, Wikipedia "makes no guarantee of validity" of its content, since no one is ultimately responsible for any claims appearing in it.[160] Concerns have been raised regarding the lack of accountability that results from users' anonymity,[161] the insertion of false information,[162] vandalism, and similar problems.

[Note:  Since this is about Wikipedia, I am going to treat what it says about itself as being reliable even though I would never normally rely on such badly produced referenced materials without backing them up with independent sources with named authors.]

The Nature article is called "non-scientific" which in one of the world's premier science journals is bizarre. A valid comparison of the rate of inaccuracy in the two "encyclopedias" would depend on some kind of mathematical calculation of identified "serious errors" from a randomly selected representative sample of articles of similar length,.  Any results which were "non-scientific"  would mean that the results would be more accurately called "meaningless."   Britannica gave a very reasoned objection to the article and on the basis of that,  I'm less than confident that Nature would be the best institution to be asserting the reliability of their article, especially reading the rather bad quality of methodology that even they admit to.   I'd call their declaration that they will not retract "brazening it out."   And it is now eight years out of date.

But most revealing of all in the Wikipedia article is the declaration that it "makes no guarantee of validity" of its content, part of its "General Disclaimer."  Since no one is ultimately responsible for any claims appearing in it,"  the "General Disclaimer" is about the most universal and absolute disavowal of responsibility of an alleged intellectual effort as I've ever seen.  It contains the best argument of why no one should rely on Wikipedia, no one is responsible for what it contains. 

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As a result of the planned method and character of Wikipedia, the obvious result of those is openly on display,  groups that train people in how to "edit" Wikipedia in favor of their point of view.   I will concentrate on one of the most blatant of those, Guerrilla Skepticism on Wikipedia.   Guerrilla Skepticism is explicit about their purpose and intention.  Here, from the masthead of its website:

The mission of the Guerrilla Skepticism editing team is to improve skeptical content of Wikipedia. We do this by improving pages of our skeptic spokespeople, providing noteworthy citations, and removing the unsourced claims from paranormal and pseudoscientific pages. Why? Because evidence is cool. We train – We mentor – Join us.

Of course, it's the Guerrilla Skeptics, of who knows what kind of expertise or in-expertise,  who decide what those "improvements" "noteworthy citations" "unsourced claims" "paranormal" and "pseudoscientific"  elements are and, given their explicit ideological stand, those will not be from any objective view point.  They will also decide what constitutes "evidence" and what is not "evidence."   Anyone who expects objectivity from such a group is certainly not exercising even the slightest bit of skepticism.

As you can hear in the second-anniversary YouTube, Guerrilla Skepticism isn't a small effort, it claims to have over 120 editors in 17 languages, this is a major effort at slanting the content of one of the most widely trusted "reference works" in the world.   It's founder claims "we reach millions of people every year."  And it isn't the only such openly organized effort with an ideological agenda.  There are other "skeptical" groups dedicated to slanting the content of Wikipedia and other internet entities that are provided with their substance by "open-sourced" generally unnamed people, often open to their repeated "liking" or "evaluation" or "editing" to allow one person an outsized presence in the result.  When they organize to do this, as they seem to increasingly be doing,  they will have an increasing influence on the "resource", which will then become their product.

It is massively irresponsible for those who could exercise control of Wikipedia to prevent this that they have taken less of a hand in guaranteeing the nature of its content than organized ideologues dedicated to exercising that kind of control.   They and their "encyclopedia" should suffer a loss of confidence due to that. If they aren't held to be discredited, then it is a sign that the intellectual culture of the country and the world has entered a more decadent period, largely due to the "information superhighway" being open to that information being mis-information.

If those who ultimately control Wikipedia don't take the strongest steps to protect Wikipedia from efforts such as those of Susan Gerbic and the rest of her Guerrilla Skeptics then it goes from being a reliable encyclopedia to being their propaganda tool.  And what the Guerrilla Skeptics are doing openly, anyone else can be doing without trumpeting their efforts.   I, somehow, doubt that if a dedicated group of Southern Baptists of the same or greater size were doing this, openly, that the result would be less than complete panic. And, of course, the way it's set up, such a group could be "editing" the thing now or could start doing so tomorrow.  And that is just one of the many horror scenarios you could dream up.

An unnamed "editor" is not an editor, an anonymously written encyclopedia in which named people do not take ultimate responsibility for its content is no encyclopedia, it is a total mess and a sign of intellectual decadence.

Note:  Family responsibilities will prevent me from writing anything on Saturday or Sunday, at least as of now.