Citing Riots

So that you may sleep at night unhindered by the burden of this deeply haunting matter, I will now lay to rest an age old question: The correct name for a polygon with 77 sides is a heptacontakaiheptagon. How in the olden days of 1992 a troubled geometer might have discovered this fact is a mystery to me—as is how someone of that era might have been able to find out who the namesake was for Ninendo video-game icon “Mario” (it’s Mario Segali, landlord of the company’s first office building).

Today, however, the methods are more or less clear: Google would be a good place to start, but the way I found the information just now was to consult Wikipedia (www.wikipedia.org), the web-based self-proclaimed “free encyclopedia.” The wildly popular site contains some half million articles in English (twice that with other languages thrown in), on topics ranging from Madonna (the 19th century Edvard Munch Painting) to Madonna (the... well, you know).

Wikipedia operates on a revolutionary principle: Any visitor to the site may add to it or edit it. Any visitor can create new articles, change old ones, add pictures or sounds, and so on. As a defense against malicious ne’er-do-wells who cruise around the ‘net with nothing better to do than delete whole pages about Confucius or Kant, the entire revision history of every article—that is, a copy of every version of the article that has ever been posted—is available for perusal alongside the current draft.

The site is an astounding monument to human knowledge. To spend a few moments browsing its enormous tangle of links is to feel an awesome sense of the breadth and depth of what mankind has accomplished, and is also an opportunity to marvel at incredible human altruism: Apparently, millions of knowledgeable internet-goers have spent hours of their time painstakingly updating articles about poisonous toads and obscure biochemical reactions.

Wikipedia also contains lies. I know, because I’m responsible for one of them: As of this writing, the year in which Yale University was founded according to the encyclopedia is not 1701 as it rightfully should be but 1702; I’ve committed my own personal one-year slight against the prestige of our younger sibling in New Haven.

My Orwellian revisionist stance has broader implications than what it might mean for the minute differences in the perceptions of Ivy League institutions, however. Wikipedia is like a microcosm for the world wide web: a massive collection of informative pages temptingly authoritative in form but perhaps nonetheless deceptive on the back end. And so we’re forced to ask ourselves, to what extent can we rely on this great resource?

Some prominent figures have taken an aggressive stance on the question of Wikipedia’s trustworthyness. In the site’s defense stands a huge corps of writers in a variety of fields, including such weighty entities as the Michigan State Supreme Court (which cited Wikipedia for information about “positional aslphyxia” in a 2004 opinion). These people may not explicitly lend their credence to the project (though some certainly have), but they give it de facto support by including it on their works cited pages.

Still, an increasingly large cadre of prominent academics has stepped forward to question the acceptibility of this trend. Famed UCLA Law Professor Eugene Volokh has posted mildly bitter invective to his weblog slamming court citations of Wikipedia as absurd given the nature of the source, but the most florid prose on the subject comes perhaps from Robert McHenry, chief of the (less and less popular—let’s keep our private interests straight) Encyclopedia Britannica. McHenry has compared Wikipedia to a public restroom: Such a facility may be obviously dirty, he has said, or it may look quite clean, but either way one has no real way of knowing who used it last.

The question is certainly a difficult one. To Wikipedia’s credit, it looks, and in most cases is, fantastic. Its coverage on even the most obscure topics generally stands up to extensive critical scrutiny, and even the quality of the prose, while variable, is in many places excellent. In fact, many of Wikipedia’s detractors think quite highly of the site and all it has accomplished—one of them, Larry Sanger, even co-founded the project, though he’s since moved on to other things.

What Sanger claims is not that the site should fall out of favor. Rather, he feels that it (and, he would argue, any other would-be reliable source online) needs to jettison some of its “anti-elitism” in favor of a legitimate peer review system, one which displays a genuine respect for authority. If, for example, there’s a dispute over the evolutionary development of women, shouldn’t we hasten to give more credit to a noted biologist than to an economist? And at any rate, shouldn’t either researcher be considered more worthy of trust than a 13 year-old doing a science fair project?

How such a sytstem might work is a complicated question, and the details will take a long time to hash out even if the necessity is ever agreed upon in the first place. In the meantime, the answer is clearly not to shy away from Wikipedia like some rabid dog needing to be put down: The momentum gathered over the past few years is too valuable a thing to let slip. Instead, we ought to follow the mantra: “know thy sources.” Healthy skepticism is by definition healthy, and independent confirmation is a valuable commodity in conjunction with any single source online. And of course, if you’re browsing Wikipedia and find an error, change it! Just follow my second example, instead of my first: Moments after altering Yale’s birthdate, I was overwhelmed with guilt and repaired my own error. A 65 year head start is good enough, I think, so long as it’s the truth.

Matthew A. Gline ’06 is a physics concentrator in Quincy House. His column appears on alternate Tuesdays.