"Snared in the Web of a Wikipedia Liar"

Read the full article By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE in the 12/4/05 edition of the New York Times. (Registration required.)

"Wikipedia is a kind of collective brain, a repository of knowledge, maintained on servers in various countries and built by anyone in the world with a computer and an Internet connection who wants to share knowledge about a subject. Literally hundreds of thousands of people have written Wikipedia entries.

"Mistakes are expected to be caught and corrected by later contributors and users.

"The whole nonprofit enterprise began in January 2001......

"It has, by most measures, been a spectacular success. Wikipedia is now the biggest encyclopedia in the history of the world. As of Friday, it was receiving 2.5 billion page views a month, and offering at least 1,000 articles in 82 languages. The number of articles, already close to two million, is growing by 7 percent a month. And Mr. Wales (Jimmy Wales, its founder) said that traffic doubles every four months.

"Still, the question of Wikipedia, as of so much of what you find online, is: Can you trust it?

"And beyond reliability, there is the question of accountability."

Reliability is of course related to the likelihood that you will find the same information on repeated visits -- important, and questionable on a site which anyone can change. Validity is perhaps a more important criteria, and indeed more like what most people mean by "can you trust it?" As with all knowledge for development, invalid information leads to poor understanding and mistaken efforts.

Accountability is an important factor to consider when seeking to estimate the validity of information. If the person who provides the information is accountable for the quality, that helps. Indeed, I suspect this is a problem faced by all open source efforts -- how do you hold volunteers, often annonymous, accountable for what they do?