Techcrunch has a profile of Biographicon, a site that touts itself as a site "for everyone's biography." I wish them the best, but I think they might have some trouble making their concept work. The idea behind the site is that it would be similar to Wikipedia, but without the notability requirement that limits Wikipedia entries to relatively famous individuals. The problem is that Wikipedia imposes these limits for good reasons. Although I've criticized Wikipedia for applying the requirement too strictly, I think it rests on a fundamentally sound insight: the wiki editing process will only work if there is a non-trivial number of people who aren't closely tied to the subject. One of the core tenets of the Wikipedia editing process is that the articles are not the authors' own opinions. Rather, they are summaries of facts that can be found in reliable sources like newspapers and magazines. This helps make the articles even-handed by giving the process some degree of objectivity. Anyone can look at the reliable sources cited and verify that they're being summarized accurately. The problem that Biographicon is likely to face is that the only people with information about most people (or the motivation to write an article about them) are the people themselves, and those with close ties to them. As a result, a Biographicon page will likely be little more than personal home page, often maintained by the subject or his close friends. The other option is even worse: somebody's enemies might come along and add unflattering information about an individual, sparking a prolonged edit war. Either way, there's no reason to expect the pages that result to be particularly accurate or well-written. The "wisdom of crowds" only works when you're able to muster an actual crowd, and it looks to me like Biographicon will have difficulty achieving the necessary critical mass for pages about people nobody's heard of.

Just as Slashdot is reporting about the mayor of Florence suing Wikipedia comes the news that a police chief in West Yorkshire, in the UK, is so upset with the edits to his own Wikipedia entry that he's required his staff to monitor the page and make changes or revisions to it in response to critical comments left on the page. Now, obviously, having critical information about you on Wikipedia may not be pleasant, but aren't there more important things for folks in a police department to be working on?

Last week Slate ran a story that breathlessly reported that Wikipedia isn't as democratic as its boosters claim because most of the edits are made by the most active editors. We learn that "a small segment of highly active users author the majority of the site's content." But as Mathew Ingram points out, the real question is why anyone found this surprising. It's true that a small fraction of Wikipedia users author a big chunk of the content. But it's quite a leap to go from that rather obvious point to deriding "fairy tales about the participatory culture of Web 2.0." In fact, Wikipedia is fundamentally different from older reference works like Britannica, and not just because it has an order of magnitude more content. In the first place, as Ingram points out, even if 1 percent of Wikipedia user base have an outsized influence on the encyclopedia's direction, that still amounts to tens of thousands of people. No commercial encyclopedia could possibly afford to have that many employees.

The distribution of edits on Wikipedia is what's known as a power law, and power law distributions are ubiquitous in human societies. You can find power laws in the distribution of income, website traffic, book and CD sales, city populations, and dozens of other phenomena. Indeed, democracy itself is subject to power laws; the most politically active voters contribute the vast majority of volunteers and campaign contributions. The fact that Wikipedians' contributions follow a power law distribution doesn't mean that Wikipedians are telling "fairy tales about the participatory culture of Web 2.0." What makes Wikipedia different from traditional encyclopedias isn't a more "democratic" distribution of contributions, but the vastly increased number of people who are able to contribute when the encyclopedia is organized in an open fashion. This has produced an encyclopedia that is far more comprehensive than any commercial company could hope to produce.

With the possible exception of our allegedly-sexual-predator-filled social networks, it seems safe to say that there's no internet phenomenon that causes quite as much finger-wagging consternation as Wikipedia. Is it credible? Complete? A worthy reference material? Personally, I'm content to leave these questions to the world's concerned librarians.

One thing that's not in question is whether Wikipedia is successful. But why aren't its competitors? Linux News' Mick O'Leary discussed the issue yesterday, specifically examining why Veropedia and Citizendium's efforts to improve upon Wikipedia don't show much promise for attracting a following. O'Leary's diagnosis of the problems with the sites' underlying models is almost beside the point: despite Wikipedia's content being reproducible under a GPL-like license, neither project has decided to use a forked Wikipedia as a starting point. As a result they simply don't have the content to count as a viable alternative.

But, as Bennett Haselton convincingly argued on Slashdot last week, this is a problem that Google's upcoming Knol initiative is unlikely to face. The prospect of ad revenue (and page views supplied by a presumably friendly PageRank) will no doubt prompt a flurry of copy & pasting from Wikipedia. And although Google's Knol announcement is a little vague, their professed light-touch approach to content sounds likely to make Wikipedia-licensed content okay for Knol. Even without an automated forking process, it seems certain that Knol will wind up mirroring large parts of Wikipedia.

But after that initial land-grab will Knol be able to take the ball from Jimmy Wales' leviathan and run with it? It depends what Google is banking on. Veropedia and Citizendium's examples strongly imply that Knol's focus on authorial accountability won't be the deciding factor in its success. A human name and grinning headshot may be more immediately comforting than an inscrutable pseudonym, but they only confer modestly more meaningful vetting opportunities than does Wikipedia's contribution-tracking system. Seriously evaluating an author's background, perspective and credibility will be a time-consuming task no matter what the underlying system is.

But if Knol instead relies on Google's built-in promotional advantages -- aka search result dirty tricks -- it's got a real shot. Wikipedia is proof that a wiki reference tool's value is largely derived from the network effects it enjoys, and currently most of those effects are driven by the site's high placement in search results. What will happen if Google decides to put Knol on an equal footing? Given Wikipedia's liberal licensing scheme and Knol's plan for more aggressively attracting content, the coming wiki showdown may wind up being decided by pure brand power more than anything else.

Perhaps taking a page from certain universities, the London bureau chief of the Agence France Presse (AFP), Pierre Lesourd, stated that the news agency's reporters are not allowed to use Facebook and Wikipedia as sources. However, Lesourd at least clarified the policy -- saying that reporters can cite any online resources as long as they also refer to other reliable, independent sources to verify the facts. Lesourd announced the AFP's position after the issue came up due to several news agencies being fooled by a fake profile of Bilawal Bhutto Zardari on Facebook.

Fortunately, the AFP realizes that fact-checking is an important part of its journalistic mission, but it seems a bit disappointing that this basic principle of responsible news reporting needs to be re-affirmed for "new media" sources. Then again, there will always be mistakes in any kind of research, so the real lesson here may be that there is an equally important basic principle of reading the news: "Don't believe everything you read."

Professor Tara Brabazon, a lecturer at the University of Brighton, is fed up with shoddy student research papers and has dubbed the rampant mis-use of Google results as "The University of Google" -- condemning the practice of simply taking the first few search engine results and compiling them for homework assignments. While we've seen several cases of schools banning the use of Wikipedia, Brabazon even goes so far as to forbid students from using Google as well as other online resources. While the criticism that lazy students are relying too much on search engines is probably valid at many universities, the solution to ban the use of search engine tools and online references seems like an unjust punishment, as well as a disservice to the students who will likely need to use search engines after they graduate. Brabazon points out that students don't attend universities to learn how to use Google, but that doesn't mean the use of websites like Wikipedia and Google should be ignored. If anything, there should be a crash course on what Google is (and is not) useful for -- analogous to the math teacher's favorite little guide "Lies My Calculator Told Me" which details the pitfalls of blindly using a calculator. Students should be taught using all the available tools that can help them further their education, along with how to use those tools effectively. On Google's side, however, perhaps the search engine giant should create a knol that describes how to write a respectable research report using Google -- without getting caught.

Slate has an interesting column by Jacob Leibenluft that compares the relative reliability of Yahoo! Answers and Wikipedia. He notes that unlike Google Answers, which was shuttered last year, Yahoo's answers site has become quite popular. Google paid its contributors to answer questions, but Yahoo! only offers contributors points that entitle them to ask questions of their own on the site. Unfortunately, even the service's own users acknowledge that Yahoo! Answers isn't very reliable. Often a question will attract a dozen or more answers. Some of them will probably be right, but others will be wrong, and it might be hard to tell which is which. Leibenluft contrasts that to Wikipedia which, while far from perfect, tends to have accurate information the vast majority of the time. He zeroes in on three important characteristics that give Wikipedia the edge. First, whereas Yahoo! Answers lets each user to give his or her own answer, the Wikipedia process is geared toward producing a single article that represents the consensus of all contributors. Second, Wikipedia has a strong norm of citing outside sources when contributors disagree. Usually, when there's a factual disagreement, someone will go out and find a citation in a reliable source to demonstrate the correct answer. Finally, Yahoo! Answers closes a question after about a week, whereas a Wikipedia article is open for editing indefinitely. This is important because Wikipedia articles tend to get more accurate over time, as more and more readers visit them and fix mistakes. It would be interesting for Yahoo! to experiment with a wiki-based format for Yahoo! Answers, where users collaborate on a single collective answer to the question rather than giving a bunch of individual answers. The major difficulty would be that the site's point-based reward system would be difficult to apply, since several users would have contributed to the final answer.

Techdirt's own Insight Community is similar in some ways to the Yahoo! and Google Answer programs. The failure of Google Answers might be a reason for pessimism, but I think there are a few key differences that make TIC more likely to succeed. First, the community is sharply focused on a fast-changing industry where expertise is especially valuable. Second, TIC is focused on providing insight and analysis, not just plain facts. With factual questions, a customer will typically be seeking a single correct answer. But with strategic business questions, there usually isn't one right answer; companies are often interested in hearing about several different approaches, and there can be a lot of value in seeing the arguments that experts marshal for various options. Finally, Techdirt is much more selective about the experts it brings onboard, using experts' blogs and other writings as a way of identifying those who know what they're talking about and can communicate it clearly. That gives the TIC a great signal-to-noise ratio.

After writing yesterday's post about politics on Wikipedia, I came across a copy of the actual email Durova sent purporting to demonstrate that the Wikipedia user she subsequently banned was a "troublemaker." What it boils down to is that the user in question was too good at contributing to Wikipedia, and so must not really have been a new user when she signed up in July. Basically, Durova thinks that she's made a suspiciously large number of helpful edits, including familiarity with relatively obscure Wikipedia features, and so she must be an experienced user creating a "sock puppet" to help unspecified co-conspirators gain control of the site. Now, it's pretty clearly paranoid to think this proves there's some kind of conspiracy going on; there are any number of reasons an experienced Wikipedian might want to start a new account, and as long as the new account isn't being used as a "sock puppet"—and Durova offered no evidence that it was—it's not really a problem.

But at the very least, Durova is right about one thing: the way you gain power and influence within the Wikipedia community is by making thousands upon thousands of helpful edits to Wikipedia articles. To the extent that there are competing factions battling for control of the site, they conduct their battle by competing to make the best contributions to the site, thereby earning the respect of other Wikipedians and enabling them to win election to leadership positions like the site's Arbitration Committee. If you peruse the comments people make when they're voting, you'll see that a lot of people vote against individuals because they haven't been on the site long enough or haven't made enough contributions. What this means is that it doesn't matter very much how paranoid, vain, or power-hungry the senior leadership of Wikipedia is, or that there might be factions plotting to seize control of the site away from the current leadership. In fact, it might actually be good for the rest of us if that's true, because it will spur each faction to re-double their efforts to do more editing in the hopes of earning the support of rank-and-file editors.

There's an obvious parallel to real-world human societies here. People often criticize capitalism for promoting greed, but that's not quite right. Greed has always existed in human societies. In pre-capitalist societies, the way greedy and ambitious people got ahead was largely by conquering new countries, enslaving their inhabitants, assassinating political rivals, lobbying the government for monopolies, and engaging in other wasteful and destructive activities. The rise of capitalism didn't abolish greed and ambition, but it harnessed it for the public good. Now, if you want to become rich and powerful, one of the best ways to do it is by creating a company that produces goods and services consumers want. (You can also still get ahead by lobbying the government for special privileges, so the system's not perfect) The better you are at serving your customers' needs, the richer you get. In a competitive market, it doesn't really matter if our elite businessmen are nice people, the system is set up so that they're driven by their own self-interest to do things that benefit their customers. By the same token, it doesn't matter if, as critics claim, Wikipedia is run by a paranoid cabal; the system is organized so that they have to continue contributing positively to the site in order to maintain their positions of authority.

The Register has a breathless write-up of a recent dispute among administrators on Wikipedia. Apparently, one Wikipedia administrator tried to ban another editor based on secret evidence, sparking widespread outrage among rank and file Wikipedians. The Register paints this as a grave crisis for the world's most popular encyclopedia. The rogue editor is apparently part of a secretive Wikipedia cabal that is fighting to maintain control of the site from outsiders, and Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales is apparently "not admitting how deep this controversy goes." Mathew Ingram points out that the apocalyptic rhetoric is rather silly. Wikipedia, like every large organization—and especially like every organization run predominantly by volunteers—has a considerable amount of internal politics. Senior Wikipedians spend a lot of time on the site, and so naturally they have strong opinions about the way it should be run. The "rogue editor" appears to have drastically over-stepped her bounds and has been reprimanded. I don't follow Wikipedia's internal politics closely enough to know if the reprimand fit the crime, or if it would have been appropriate to strip her of her administrative privileges as some Wikipedians were demanding. But I think it's a mistake to think that this incident reflects some kind of crippling flaw in Wikipedia. The site has hundreds of passionate volunteers dedicated to making it better, and it has an open dispute-resolution process that makes it harder for under-handed tactics to stay undetected. The fact that senior Wikipedians have vehement disagreements is not an indictment of the site. Most organizations have these sorts of disagreements behind closed doors, while Wikipedia makes them public for everyone to see. In the long run, that's going to prove one of Wikipedia's strengths, not a weakness.

We've heard time and time again that schools refuse to allow Wikipedia citations in papers. That's somewhat understandable. However, what's ridiculous is to go beyond that to the point that some teachers and even entire schools are now blocking Wikipedia entirely from school computers. It's hard to see how this furthers the cause of education. If anything, it does the exact opposite. If the concern is that Wikipedia may not be trustworthy, why not teach students how Wikipedia works, how to improve it and how to think critically before believing any particular source? What's amazing is that people complain about inaccurate info in Wikipedia as a reason it shouldn't be trusted -- but those same people don't seem to try to ban the use of the Encyclopedia Britannica when significant errors are found in it. And, when errors are found in Britannica (which some studies have shown occur just as frequently as in Wikipedia), they remain there. When errors are found in Wikipedia, they quickly get corrected. Again, though, it comes down to learning not to trust any single source as being authoritative -- and teaching kids to be skeptical of any source. Completely banning a source does students a complete disservice. Once they leave the school and encounter Wikipedia on their own, wouldn't it be better if they'd spent some time with a teacher assisting them to understand the pros and cons of Wikipedia so they know how to use it properly on their own?