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Wikipedia, one of the world's 15 most popular websites, has more than 10 times the number of entries in Encyclopaedia Britannica A car that runs on water, a new form of energy derived from 'hydrinos', a 'cognitive-theoretic' model of the universe. They sound like fantastical concepts you might find in the pages of the latest Harry Potter book, or Alastair Reynolds novel. In fact, they're all entries in the wildly popular collaborative online encyclopaedia, Wikipedia. At first glance, the site's main entry for 'hydrino theory' looks objective and reliable; but link to the entry's discussion section – where authors and editors can debate content – and you'll find another side to the story. The discussion reveals the colourful history and heated debate behind the entry's evolution. So how many other Wikipedia entries are contested? The avowedly populist online encyclopaedia, created by volunteers from across the world, is among the world's 15 most popular web sites and has 40 million readers in the U.S. alone. And despite its collaborative nature, many academics are happy for their students to use the resource. "I'm a big fan of Wikipedia," says Sean Carroll, a physicist with the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. "It evolves rapidly in response to current events, can grow to arbitrary size, and contains links to interesting outside resources – what more could you want?." A recent in-depth piece in the New Yorker credited Wikipedia for its 'free-information-for-all' ethos, the all-inclusiveness of its varied articles and its vast number of entries – currently more than 10 times the number of entries in Encyclopaedia Britannica. However, as the populist encyclopaedia has grown, so has the question of its reliability. An increasing number of academics - many of whom have helped edit the resource to maintain informal quality control - are concerned that Wikipedia is becoming a stronghold for cranks: people who anonymously submit and edit entries on pet subjects to bolster the credibility of highly questionable theories. The hydrino theory listed above is just one example of crank science trying to gain credibility through the online encyclopaedia. But there are hundreds of others, with legions of supporters willing to donate their time and - often anonymously - promote questionable science. A 'Cognitive Theoretic Model of the Universe', which claims to be a metaphysical theory of the relationship between mind and reality, no longer has its own entry on Wikipedia, but the subject has generated a great deal of heat on the discussion page for its creator, one Christopher Michael Langan. Two supporters of Langan, with the online pseudonyms Asmodeus and DrL, have been permanently banned from editing the article about Langan because of their overtly one-sided support of his theory. One Wikipedia editor, who asked not to be identified, said there was reason to believe that Asmodeus was Langan himself, and DrL, his wife. Controversy such as this has fuelled concern over the accuracy of Wikipedia entries in general. In April 2007 the history department of Middlebury College in Vermont, USA, banned its students from referencing any material on Wikipedia. And this might only be the tip of the iceberg. Because Wikipedia allows anonymous editing as a matter of principle, any promoter of a crackpot idea can potentially sign-in and add comments and links supporting baseless theories. This is called 'wikishilling' in Wikipedia lingo. One way self-promoters operate is by creating 'sock puppets': editing their pet pages anonymously from internet addresses different to the ones they normally use at work or home. This makes their edits and entries appear to be the work of other contributors. More narcissistic cranks use Wikipedia's perceived reliability to promote themselves or their personal cause. They typically create a user account under a pseudonym, then author an entry about themselves. They – or their friends and associates - can then create supplementary articles on Wikipedia to support the original entry. For ideas like hydrino theory, which have the potential to generate serious financial investment, Wikipedia can be a way of conferring legitimacy on something that wouldn't stand up to scientific peer review. Proposed by medical student Randell Mills, the hydrino theory suggests that large amounts of energy could be tapped when hydrogen atoms make a transition from their ground state of energy to a hitherto unknown state, supposedly below this level. According to Robert Park, a physicist at the University of Maryland, USA, Mills was even able to persuade NASA to take his idea seriously. The U.S. space agency was convinced enough to purchase some cold-fusion-cell-like devices and test Mills's prediction, with "inconclusive" results. Park keeps an eye on the hydrino theory from his blog. "I have mentioned Mills and hydrinos several times," he says. "Each year … I put out my 'March Madness' issue, which began with the 'discovery' of cold fusion by Pons and Fleischmann on March 23, 1989." He is not surprised that Mills and others with questionable theories have set up camp in Wikipedia. "This, of course, is what everyone predicted would happen to Wikipedia. Too bad. Science owes its success and credibility to openness. Wikipedia, it was hoped, would simply take openness to a new level. This is a level too far. Maybe we can work through this trend," he says. So what can the army of editors maintaining Wikipedia do to improve its credibility? The arbitration committee set up to provide a review of ongoing controversies is starting to formally address the issue (see science apologists and pseudoscience, for example). However, a major stumbling block to catching cranks is the fact that the tools editors must use to uncover wikishilling or violations of the rules are also a threat to privacy. They rely on a level of snooping - tracing IP addresses, for example, to the location where users log in - that many Wikepedians find ethically questionable. And there's no consensus among Wikipedians that stricter policing and oversight are appropriate, given the populist goals of the online encyclopaedia. Wikipedia now seems caught between a rock and a hard place. If it stays true to the populist and libertarian ideals of its co- founder Jimmy Wales, it may eventually sink under the weight of unreliability. But if it demands more accountability from contributors, it will lose the anti-elitist ideals that inspired its creation. John Farrell is a writer and producer based in Boston, Massachusetts, USA. Readers' comments
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If this article was a wiki...
If this article was a wiki, I could correct your grammatical errors. For example:
And despite its collaborative nature, many academics are happy for their students use the resource.
Oh well.
Rklawton
be sure your own house is in order....
If this article WERE a wiki.....
Who's House?
Uhmm, excuse me, how many articles were there?
And since when would a singular noun take a plural verb?
Duh! It's a subjunctive
Duh! It's a subjunctive first person singular signifying the conditional
Needless worrying.
Those who criticize the open community nature of Wikipedia seem to me overly concerned that its readership somehow lack brains of their own with which to reason and judge the voices of Wikipedia for themselves.
All sources of information contain errors and biases and it is the depth and extent of the Wikipedia community that is its ultimate strength.
One does not toss the baby out with the bath water merely because of a few warts that won't wash off.
As for peer review of controversial ideas, we're better off having a wide community than a narrow minded one who are all too often engrained in conventional thinking and its attendent sociological and financial pressures (e.g., the grant funding pressure to conform to one's peer's present paradigms).
Be careful not to jump to conclusions
I am not a fan of Wikipedia. I think it would be improved if authors were obligated to reveal their real names and e-mail addresses. But, I think it is far better to include controversial and far-out ideas than to suppress them.
A case in point is cold fusion, the effect discovered by Flieschmann and Pons. Many people believe that cold fusion was never repliated, or that papers on the subject were never published. This is incorrect. It was replicated by researchers in hundreds of world-class laboratories such as Los Alamos and Mitsubishi, and these researchers published roughly 1,000 papers in mainstream, peer-reviewed journals such as the Japanese Journal of Applied Physics (Japan's most prestigeous). You will find nothing about cold fusion in Encyclopedia Britannica or the Scientific American, but the Wikipedia article on is does a credible job of listing important aspects of it, with footnotes to some of the major papers.
If you doubt this many papers have been published, please see our web site:
http://www.lenr-canr.org/
Our bibliography here includes 3,500 papers, including ~1,000 peer-reviewed ones, plus we offer 500 full text papers. You might argue that all of these papers are wrong, but it is a fact that they were all published by leading scientists from major institutions.
As for Robert Park, he often attacks cold fusion researchers as frauds and lunatics. He has told leading cold fusion researchers, and me, that he has not read any papers on the subject, but he knows they are wrong a priori. It is obvious from his comments that he has read nothing and knows nothing about the subject. I think it is unethical for a professional to comment on serious research that he has not read about, so I think that Robert Park has no credibility.
- Jed Rothwell
Librarian, LENR-CANR.org
I agree ..Wiki needs contributors names
Looking forward twenty years, will on-line media gain the credibility of major science journals, encyclopedias and such? I think so - only if anonymity becomes voluntary attribution with a name attached.
I think many online journals (and Google) secretly want Wiki-like ideas to fail for some of the very reasons cited above. It's also based on profit motive at the moment, which elevates stature in publishing. Take away the profit by allowing free content to be contributed openly and it threatens the status quo in some ways. Take away peer review as it is done today by 'etablishment science' behind closed doors, or remove the algorithms and bots that build content like Google and again the same happens. This is not to say that both can't be accomplished with a Wiki-like publishing model - it can with vision and imagination to think outside the box.
Wiki-like ideas will perhaps evolve as the web grows by even more leaps and bounds in the years ahead. It just needs tweaks to make it even stronger. I predict it will even attract the likes of Google someday as their own business model evolves and they see the opportunities they are missing with humans in the loop of what is now a very robot like process of weighing credibility and sifting, sorting and presenting search information.
I shudder to think we will have no further progress in the next twenty years in allowing peer review or content building in more intelligent ways using the web than we do now. To me the arrow points upward and onward. For this I think Wiki deserves great praise in blazing new trails and upsetting the existing "print and on-line" publishing apple carts. It only gets better - in many similar ways.
Tom Wilson, TX
naming users and more
I agree in theory regarding proper names, this would make users more responsible and lessen the changes of deliberate vandalism or even just bias (which is less easy to spot and so arguably is more of a problem than a clearly wrong fact). I have been a contributor to wikipedia for over a year, though often I only tidy up grammar or sloppy sentences as I read through. However, consider the practical requirements of named users. Firstly there is the problem of verifying that people are who they say they are. Within this there are other problems. For example, one common criticism of wikipedia is that experts and academics are not given preference in view, or that their view is not accorded special status. Let's say we consider this view valid. Imagine then the secondary problem of named users establishing credentials (which is not hard, but still requires admin etc, making costs higher for wikipedia and perhaps also discouraging new registrations because people don't like filling in forms). Additionally, what about borderline educational facilities: which do we accept and which do we not? Therefore, for practical reasons, as well as ideological (appeal to authority (university academics) is not always the safe option. Finally, specific to the problem of named users we could imagine a scenario where a user was known to an individual, or was tracked down, and then confronted by an angry person (some debates get very personal). While I generally am happy to view my opinions publicly, I do not know that my next door neighbour is not some rabid extremist (they're all the same) who's unhappy with taking action based on comments I have made, because he feels they are offensive to his belief system. Given that has even a slim chance of causing real world problems I do not think it is valid to ask for proper names.
One of the problems with criticisms of wikipedia is that while they are often valid, they do ignore that wikipedia has a rather large and dedicated community of users, and that there are well-thought out protocols for dealing with matters that are often mentioned. Proper names do exist on wikipedia; user names can be searched and one can see previous entries and so on.
Another point which is missed is that wikipedia does not allow original research. If a new article or a contentious point is not referenced to a published source it may be deleted. You might say, well what's stopping someone printing their view and then writing an article? This is true. However, if someone makes inaccurate or widely untrue claims in some field then it is the job for experts in that field to publish articles rebutting. Wikipedia can then cover this, or, if the initial claim is absurd it might just point out that the claim violates an established scientific law or disregards established historical fact.
The main problem with wikipedia is probably the worry that you might contribute and then it will be simply deleted. The interface and transparency needs to be improved, even if just in terms of ease of use. But wikipedia is still by far my favourite website, and probably my largest source of newly acquired information. As a postgrad university student I would never think that what is written on wikipedia should be considered 'learning' by the standards of an academic essay. Real learning of course still requires books. However, when you need to do a bit of background reading on the development of Sumerian pictography, the structure of bee colonies, or you just want a basic introduction with a list of further sources you might like to consult, you can't do much better than wikipedia for breadth and availability. Also, it kills time like nothing else if you're working an office job.
Up to 9 months ago we
Up to 9 months ago we financially contributed funds to Wikipedia but no more, for we thought that it was a good idea and where its thinking was in unison with our own at that time - using knowledge for the good of humankind. When we as novices tried to place our Swiss charity within Wikipedia we were absolutely savaged by the editors. They in fact blocked our right of reply, which is documented by themselves.
Thereafter we even sent our registration documents via email to the then executive director of Wikimedia, the holding organization, to prove that our international group was registered as a Swiss charity. He did nothing at all. A few months later he resigned with another top Wikimedia executive, 'Jimbo's second in command. The greatest problem with Wikipedia that we now find is that they are highly selective in who should place information and where therefore they will never really have a web-based encyclopaedia that is unbiased and totally factual. It is totally at the whims of the few enlightened ones who control what should be a great reference. Unfortunately we now see that it is not.
For anyone interested further on how Wikipedia editors work, the full account including all emails will be part of our next web newsletter 'Scientific Discovery'. It will be on-line by the end of July 2007. Overall, it is time we feel that Wikipedia looked internally at itself and that they concluded that they have major problems with the way they treat new entrants. This analysis should especially be directed towards the attitude of their editors, who remove the right of reply and delete super-quick for reasons not based on evidence but only hearsay. By the way also, the Wikipedian Editor Zoe who first blocked us and the initial instigator of all the basic trouble, fell out with 'Jimbo' and where she as well left a few months later. Apparently she had made a vendetta against a certain professor according to 'Jimbo's' opinion. Thereafter she took her bat and ball home and has never been seen since. I believe she also threatened the embattled professor at the time - the web link is http://72.14.209.104/search?q=cache:dUfUXyA24wwJ:www.encyclopediadramatica.com/Zoe+zoe+wikipedia+professor+change+wikipedia&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=3&gl=uk.
Dr. David Hill
Chief Executive
World Innovation Foundation Charity (reg. no. CH-035.7.035.277-9 - 11th July 2005)
Bern, Switzerland
Caution - this article is misleading
An interesting little article, if only because it is almost completely misleading in its references to me, my wife, and my ideas, and the use of those references to exemplify Wikipedia’s problem with “narcissistic cranks” and “questionable theories”. The actual facts of the case cited by Mr. Farrell can be found in pages accessible from those linked above, and they do not weigh in Wikipedia’s favor. Suffice it to say that Wikipedia's worst problem is not cranks and their theories, but its huge and growing population of anonymous trolls, vandals, and fake "experts", many of whom function as Wikipedia administrators.
Lest anyone be given the wrong impression, neither I nor my wife has ever introduced an article on me or the CTMU to Wikipedia. Those articles were authored, and signed, by others with no known connection to us. As regards the editing of existing articles, the rules of Wikipedia, while discouraging "conflicts of interest", explicitly allow the subjects of Wikipedia articles to remove defamation and correct falsehoods regarding themselves, their ideas, and their activities (obviously, prohibiting such corrections could lead to serious legal and ethical difficulties for Wikipedia). Although the Wikipedia Arbitration Committee does not always respect those rules, certain militant editors and outright trolls who had been pseudonymously using the encyclopedia to attack my reputation and ideas were ultimately warned to desist by the head of the Wikimedia Foundation.
Of course, like everyone else, those who run Cosmos magazine are welcome to their opinions, no matter how uninformed or premature they may be. However, I respectfully suggest that its editors, editorial advisors, and executives be a bit more careful regarding the possible long-term effects of such disparaging articles. Responsible intellectual commerce has no room for veiled accusations and snide insinuations like those exemplified above.
Incidentally, should any scientist or philosopher on the staff of Cosmos ever wish to take open, reasoned, non-pseudonymous exception to any technical statement actually made or written by me and invite a response, I welcome him or her to do so. If nothing else, the readers of Cosmos might find such an exchange instructive. But in any event, rumor-based, content-deficient articles like this have very little relevance to science, cosmology, or anything legitimately related to them.
Christopher M. Langan