Are Wiki's Inherently Flawed?

Wiki's are all the rage in the training and development industry, but are they really workable?

Wikipedia is the most popular wiki in the world. It compiles information when users add, modify, or delete entries. Wikipedia is intended to mimic an encyclopedia, but wikis have other uses. For example, the Learning 2005 conference used a wiki (and is still using a wiki) at www.learningwiki.com.

John Seigenthaler was recently wikied when someone edited his Wikipedia entry in a most unflattering way, describing him as involved in John F. Kennedy's and Robert Kennedy's assasinations. He was not. Now his wrong information has spread all over the web. Not only that, but "vicious, vindicative, almost violent stuff, homophobic, racist stuff" about him was later added to his entry. Seigenthaler has thoughtfully suggested that there are "incurable flaws in the Wikipedia method of doing things."

You can listen to Seigenthaler tell his own story along with the founder of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales. It's a fascinating online interview by the host of NPR's "Talk of the Nation."

Wikipedia is changing it's methods to minimize these types of issues, but the question is, will these methods be enough. Jimmy Wales states that "You should take Wikipedia with a grain of salt. I think you should take almost everything with a grain of salt, but in particular Wikipedia is definitely a work in process."

The underlying belief about wikis is that "all of us are smarter than a few of us." This is comforting illusion in theory, but is just plain wrong in practice. The mediocre don't always understand enough to judge an expert's pronouncements. Groups of people often tend toward groupthink or mob psychosis. Powerful interests often control the public conversation and thus become the final arbiters of what is fact. Conspiracy theories often have ninety-nine lives.

Wikis, blogs, websites (indeed, all forms of communication) carry with them the possibility that the information conveyed is not true. The more widely some information is dispersed, the bigger the potential problems. The more our communication channels have validators who correct inaccuracies, the more we tend to move toward the truth. For example, the press has traditionally played a role in holding public officials to account and conveying the news to people. Competition, as between political parties, can surface truths sometimes. Peer policing, as academic researchers do through research referring mechanisms, offer a correcting mechanism. Credentialling standards or agencies control who gets into a field or who advances.

Sometimes having more people can bring more truth to light. There are recent cases where political bloggers have uncovered facts regarding scandalous actions that have otherwise gone unnoticed. Reading a newspaper's letters to the editor is often quite enlightening, offering improvements and corrections to the regular writers' commentary.

In my work at Work-Learning Research, I have tried to track down myths that have led us astray in the learning-and-performance industry. By now you have probably seen my investigation of the notion that people remember 10% of what they read, 20% of what they see, 30% of what they hear...etc." Read this and you'll see that it's not true.

In using Wiki's to promote learning and knowledge, consider doing the following:

• Consider who will be able to add and/or edit the information. The higher the percentage of expertise in your population, the better. The lower the opportunities for personal gain, the less likely you'll get intentionally troublesome information.
• Build in some validation methods. Build in some skepticism.
• Consider not letting anyone post anonymously.
• Consider forgoing the goal of knowledge creation or learning, and instead focusing on creating hypotheses and generating ideas for future consideration and judgment, networking to increase informal-learning connections.
• Consider building in some sort of assessment system on the value of entries, whether through community scoring, expert scoring, or openness about a person's posting history and background.
• Insist that each posting include a section entitled, "Why should anyone listen to me about this topic," or some such addendum.

Comments

[Sim2Learn]

I love your stuff, Will. Keep up the good work!

However, in this instance, you said:
"The underlying belief about wikis is that "all of us are smarter than a few of us." This is comforting illusion in theory, but is just plain wrong in practice."

I wonder how this perspective is accommodated with the theories J. Surowiecki offers in 'The Wisdom of Crowds' (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0385503865/102-1892604-4687324?v=glance&n=283155)?

[Barb McDonald]

Will, maybe your blog entry should really have been "Is Wikipedia Inherently Flawed". Wikipedia isn't wikis, it's one use of the wiki environment. There are other educational uses for wiki's. Many of the adult learning practioner's I know use them to develop work/ideas together when members are geographically dispersed. In other words, it can be a web-based word processor. It's better than creating a document that has to be attached to an email or ftp location or something, because it's available to everyone in the group without having to wonder who has the latest version. This would be my primary use for it, just for the reason you mentioned -- anything created in a public wiki isn't necessarily true

[Karl Kapp]

Interesting notes about Wikipedia and collective knowledge:

1) A study by the British Journal "Nature" found that "Wikipedia comes close to Britannica in terms of accuracy of its scientific entries. You can got to http://www.nature.com for details. It seems that both Encyclopaedias had errors...but each had about the same amount.

2) Interesting quote found in Marc Rosenberg's newest book "Beyond E-Learning." The quote is from James Surowiecki who wrote the book, "The Wisdom of Crowds." The quote, "If in years hence, people remember anything about the TV game show, 'Who Wants to be a Millionaire?' they will probably remember the contestants' panicked phone calls to friends and relatives...What people probably won't remember is that every week, 'Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?' pitted group intelligence [polling the studio audience] against individual intelligence, and that group intelligence won."

[Helen Masters]

The whole Wikipedia concept is fatally flawed. The notion that one can produce an authoritative encyclopedia without any kind of editorial control is patently ridiculous.

There is a far greater and more insidious threat to Wikipedia than simple character assassination or falsehood. It can broadly be labelled “infomercial content” (i.e. content that purports to be informative but has a commercial bias). A good example is the entry on Barcelona (Spain). The whole article reads like a tourist brochure and any reference to the city’s pollution problems is swiftly removed by an army of self-appointed censors. There are strong indications that the Barcelona Tourist Board (or its army of acolytes) has effectively hijacked the site. This kind of thing is going to become more prevalent as Wikipedia becomes better known. Basically, there is nothing that can be done to stop this corporate take-over of Wikipedia without editorial control yet such control runs counter to the whole Wiki ethos.

The idea that “a community of users” is going to apply some common sense criteria regarding content is a mistaken one. In the case of the Barcelona entry, the influence of Catalan/Spanish speakers on both content and style is all too evident. The locals seem eager to “sell” their city to the wider world and to show off their appalling English. Wikipedia not only lacks the control mechanisms to stop them, it also wilfully fails to recognize it has a serious problem.