How many times will situations like the following happen before people realize how badly trying to suppress information online backfires? Apparently, a German politician who was upset about some things in his Wikipedia profile went to court and got a judge to issue an order to block Wikipedia's German site. Of course, as soon as news of this came to light, the politician backed down and apologized. So, instead of getting the information he wanted suppressed, now that information has been brought to many more peoples' attention, and (of course) the site will remain accessible. Good work.

I've long been a staunch defender of Wikipedia -- a site that I think many of us find quite useful. Most of the criticisms directed at Wikipedia come off as misguided -- and usually come from people who only just realized that anyone can edit it and insist this is somehow bad before recognizing that this usually tends to be pretty good, because it means mistakes tend not to last very long. That isn't to say that mistakes aren't made -- or even that they're not made quite frequently. But, as long as you recognize that Wikipedia, by itself, is not meant to be the definitive source, then it is still an amazingly useful repository of information that can be used as a starting point.

However, Simpson Garfinkel has an interesting article pointing out that there is one element of Wikipedia's relationship to "truth" that should be examined. That is, the site very highly values verifiability over truth. In other words, it will always side with a citation over personal knowledge -- even if that citation is incorrect. This leads to some odd situations, when you think about it. After all, people will point out that Wikipedia's advantage over something like Britannica is that mistakes stay for much longer in Britannica. But, that might only be true if the Wikipedia entry isn't based on a false citation.

If the Wikipedia entry is based on a false citation, and there's no other citation that contradicts it, then it's likely that Wikipedia's entry will remain wrong, but citable. So, the easy editing of Wikipedia is a bit meaningless if the source of the false fact is not also editable (or if there's no citation that shows the original citation is wrong). I've seen this myself lately with the short entry about me. While I do take quite seriously the typical admonition not to edit your own entry, I have checked it at times. What amuses me, is that it tends to have my birthday wrong (flipping the month and the date, such that my real birthday -- December 8, or 12/08 -- is flipped to August 12, or 08/12). I've been watching a couple of people (one of whom I'm pretty sure I know) argue back and forth about the date, with the person who keeps flipping it back to the wrong date claiming at one point that he is me. He's not. Of course, I don't take this as evidence of Wikipedia's failure, but more a reminder of what the site is and what it's not. It's a useful starting point for investigation, which is quite often reliable and sufficient, but I wouldn't recommend betting your life on it. Or even your birthday.

For quite some time, Overstock's CEO, Patrick Byrne, has been on something of a... campaign against the practice of "naked short selling." Byrne isn't known for holding back his opinions on just about anything, and his complaints about naked short selling resulted in a rather massive Wikipedia edit war -- with folks on every side pointing fingers and arguing with each other over supposed dirty tactics by folks on the other side. Now, with the whole financial collapse thing happening, The Register (one of few publications to take Byrnes' side most of the time, often due to its irrational dislike of Wikipedia) is claiming that Byrne has been "vindicated," first on the evils of naked short selling, and second on the Wikipedia edit wars.

If only it were so simple. As this excellent Alex Blumberg/Planet Money podcast makes quite clear, while naked short selling may be sketchy, it's impact is minimal, if anything. And, as anyone with a most basic understanding of markets can tell you, short selling (naked or otherwise) doesn't drive down the price of a stock. The Register also suggests that Byrne was vindicated in the Wikipedia edit war, by noting proof (that is not shown, and was only provided to The Register by Byrne) that a reporter who had formerly denied taking part in the edit war, actually had been involved. That's not exactly a huge smoking gun either. It may be that this guy had a personal vendetta against Byrne, but it's got little to do with the financial crisis going on today. There are lots of things that created this mess: but naked short selling (even if the SEC came out against it, in part) is currently a minor scapegoat, not the cause.

While I tend to think that Wikipedia is a good thing overall, that's because I know it's not a source that should be relied on by itself for important decisions -- such as whether or not to grant political asylum to an individual. It can be useful as a starting point, if that information can be corroborated elsewhere. Apparently, the Department of Homeland Security felt otherwise in using Wikipedia to deny a request for asylum for a woman. An Appeals Court has now overturned that decision, noting the problems with using Wikipedia as a sole source of info, but the whole scenario should make you wonder. Did DHS really not have the ability to check the legitimacy of the woman's documents without resorting to Wikipedia? What sort of resources are provided to immigration officials that they're making judgments based on a Wikipedia page?

Back in May, when literary agent Barbara Bauer sued the Wikimedia Foundation, claiming that it was liable for various critical comments on the site (such as the ones calling her the "dumbest of the twenty worst" agents, who has "no documented sales at all"), we suggested she probably would have saved a lot of time, effort and heartbreak using Wikipedia to look up Section 230 of the CDA that says that service providers are not liable for the content of their users. Instead, she went forward with the lawsuit and had the court teach her the lesson that Wikipedia could have: the court tossed out the case, noting that the Wikimedia Foundation is not liable under section 230. The end result for Barbara Bauer? She doesn't get to sue Wikipedia, and her actions brought a lot more attention to the fact that she has a lot of critics. I have no idea how "smart" she is as a literary agent, but this didn't seem very "smart" concerning how to respond to criticism of her reputation.

Last year plenty of attention was paid to the release of Wikiscanner, a tool from Virgil Griffith that connected the IP addresses of Wikipedia edits with the companies from which they came. This resulted in a few PR flare ups as people noticed some questionable editing by biased parties. Griffith has now upgraded Wikiscanner to do even more (and renamed it to Wikiwatcher). While the revelations probably won't be as surprising, it will allow some way of connecting those who may have edited at home to their employers.

However, perhaps an even more interesting discussion is somewhat buried at the end of the Forbes article linked above: the question over whether or not anonymity is a good or bad thing for Wikipedia. The article quotes Marc Rotenberg, the director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, complaining that Wikipedia needs to do a better job protecting individuals' privacy. Griffith responds that removing anonymity should improve the quality of Wikipedia:

"I would say that if people are anonymous, the quality of their contribution is probably much lower. Wouldn't you want Wikipedia users to be held accountable for what they change?"

This brings up a few interesting questions. Rotenberg's complaint seems misplaced. The fact that your IP address is revealed with each edit is a known fact. Anyone editing Wikipedia should take that into account. That's hardly Wikipedia's problem. But anonymity can also be an important factor in getting content out. And so far, it appears that all of the "scandals" associated with Wikiscanner were related to biased parties changing info in their favor -- which certainly suggests Giffith has a point: catching those who are changing Wikipedia with ulterior motives does seem to improve the reliability of the site.

Wikipedia has apparently been testing a system by which new edits from most users don't show up for most visitors until they get approved by someone with "authority." The plan sounds similar to one that was suggested a year ago -- but in that case, the new edits would simply be shaded in a different color to warn people that they hadn't been reviewed. That seems much more effective than completely waiting to approve any edit -- especially since the "approvals" are really just to weed out vandalism, not to review the actual trustworthiness of the content. But with color coded "unreviewed" content, it will remind users to make sure they're even more cautious than they should be with regular Wikipedia content. Either way, requiring approval before edits go live seems like it would take away much of the spirit that made Wikipedia what it is today.

With all the questions zipping around about whether or not Wikipedia is "good" or "bad," one thing that often gets lost in the shuffle is the question of why people contribute to Wikipedia. Toronto's Globe and Mail has a fascinating column written by, Ivor Tossell, the guy who edited the Wikipedia page about Meet the Press to add in the fact that Tim Russert died. This isn't the guy who got fired for editing Tim Russert's Wikipedia page, but someone who went to the Meet the Press website soon afterwards and noticed that it hadn't yet been updated.

What's most fascinating is that he's not sure why he edited it, but he felt compelled to. It wasn't so much to make sure that the public was properly informed -- but more for personal gratification: the fact that he was "the first" to get there and notice it. As he says, "it was more like the primal instinct that makes people shout "First!" on online forums, a recognition of the improbable act of stumbling across a special place at just the right time." In other words, it's not about some grand social consciousness or need to participate -- but for wholely selfish reasons: to be able to say that he was the guy who did it. To make him feel special.

What is it about breaking news that can turn bemused onlookers into frothing fan-boys? The ability to edit Wikipedia should have lost its thrill by now. People having been fraudulently offing each other on Wikipedia for ages; the comic Sinbad appeared on the public radar for the first time in years when he had to insist that his Wikipedia page exaggerated reports of his own demise. A British Web magazine called B3ta.com ran a competition last year to see whose virtual celebrity assassination would last the longest on Wikipedia. But those were just diversions.

The action is in writing history as it happens. As Noam Cohen of the Times observed, Wikipedia guarantees its readers a large audience. There's no shortage of ways to publish things online, most of which will start with readerships of precisely zero. The Internet gives everybody the power to be ignored. But editing a Wikipedia page that's at the heart of a breaking news story will affect thousands upon thousands of readers.

So, despite all those who claim that those who give up their "free" labor are being exploited, or even those who suggest that such endeavors are "communist," it appears that it really comes back to your basic capitalist instincts: self-interest rules the day. If there's a personal benefit, no matter how silly, for someone to feel like they were the first to provide the info, it will get provided.

We've seen this before, of course. There are teachers and professors out there who blame Wikipedia for mistakes students make, and even those who demand that the entire Wikipedia be blocked in schools. However, there are those who are a lot more reasonable about it, recognizing that Wikipedia is just one source among many, and there's value in embracing Wikipedia: teaching kids what it is and how to use it reliably. That seems likely to be a lot more effective and useful for training kids how to critically judge the reliability of information out in the real world. Blocking, banning or blaming Wikipedia seems only designed to put one's head in the sand and pretend it doesn't exist. That's not preparing anyone for the real world.

Techdirt reader cram writes in to point out two contrasting articles that show this dichotomy of thought in action. First is a report out of Scotland last week blaming Wikipedia for kids getting failing grades. This, of course, seems ridiculous. What it really means is that teachers have failed to actually teach kids how to use Wikipedia properly. It's not the fault of Wikipedia -- which is merely an information source. It's a failure of teachers to teach kids how to properly use it. That's why it's nice to see the corresponding article, where students in Australia are now going to have a course available on how to use Wikipedia. That seems a lot smarter than just blaming Wikipedia.

A couple of weeks ago, Mark Bauerlein wrote an interesting piece about Wikipedia's stylistic mediocrity, and the way this mediocrity is bleeding into his students' writing. Using the example of articles about Moby Dick, Bauerlein suggests that traditional professionally-authored encyclopedias tend to be written in a punchier, more engaging style. The JOHO blog responds with a couple of interesting points. It suggests that Wikipedia's policy of describing things from a neutral point of view might wind up making them less compelling reading. Indeed, a crucial part of good writing is knowing what to leave out, and that's hard to accomplish when you're trying to present all sides of a subject in a neutral manner. Still, the JOHO blog points out that when you look at the Wikipedia article's section on Captain Ahab -- as opposed to the introductory passage -- the difference with professionally-edited works isn't as stark as Bauerlein suggests. It's uneven and could certainly use some help from a professional editor, but it presents the essential information in a coherent and engaging fashion.

In any event, the fundamental lesson here is that teachers should be explicitly teaching their students how to use Wikipedia correctly. Wikipedia isn't a role model for good writing, nor should it be cited as an authoritative source. But it's an incredibly useful source if used correctly -- as a starting point for learning about a new topic and finding pointers to more authoritative sources on that topic. The Wikipedia editing process is optimized for these purposes, focusing on breadth and timeliness more than perfect accuracy or style. I think one good way to help teach this point would be for professors to edit Wikipedia articles on overhead projectors in front of their classes. This would provide some real-world examples of mediocre style to critique and improve in an interactive fashion. It would also give students a clear sense of how Wikipedia works, which is the first step to understanding how to use it well. People are much less likely to take Wikipedia as gospel after seeing their professors change it. And of course, it would help improve Wikipedia for everyone else; if the idea caught on, it might be only a few years before professors started having problems finding articles that still needed improving.