“Broken beyond repair”–a bit out of context
The London Times asked me to comment about the British Education Secretary’s recommendation of Wikipedia: it is “an incredible force for good in education,” the Secretary is reported as having said. Of my comment, three words, “broken beyond repair,” have been highlighted. But this is misleading; my opinion of Wikipedia has not really changed. Let me give you the whole quote:
I’m afraid that Secretary Johnson does not realize the many problems afflicting Wikipedia, from serious management problems, to an often dysfunctional community, to frequently unreliable content, and to a whole series of scandals. While Wikipedia is still quite useful and an amazing phenomenon, I have come to the view that it is also broken beyond repair.
I don’t wish to dismiss the actual excellent work that many well-meaning Wikipedians have contributed to the resource over the years. I am commenting first and foremost on Wikipedia’s governance. Governance is, as I think Clay Shirky said, a “certifiable Hard Problem” (or something to that effect) — but Wikipedia has made a complete mess of it. Wikipedia’s governance is “broken,” and the ways in which it is broken can’t be fixed — as I said back when I launched the Citizendium. But, again, that doesn’t mean it isn’t still quite useful.
I can only hope that we on the Citizendium will do better. I can certainly confirm that it’s a hard problem.
Yeah, I woke up to calls from the BBC and the Press Association (for their industry magazine) this morning. The media going “let’s you and him fight”
They tried for a juicy fighting quote back from Wikipedia - I just said that Citizendium looks good so far, good community, there’s gotta be more than one way to do this, the more open content the better.
I also spoke of how to use Wikipedia in the class: it’s good and useful, but you have to learn how to think about what you read. So a teacher can teach kids how to read Wikipedia, blogs, autobiographies, Citizendium, Britannica, the newspaper, etc.
The BBC wanted a quote for camera, which should be on the BBC1 six o’clock news this evening. An hour’s filming for likely seven to ten seconds.
Comment by David Gerard — April 11, 2007 @ 6:41 am
The Times story was covered quite widely here in the UK. It was discussed on the ‘Sky’ half-hour paper review on Tuesday night.
I saw the 6 o’clock news, with Rory Cellan-Jones’s report starting @ 6.21 which included a short interview with David Gerard as he mentions above, and an interview with someone called Ian Grant from Encyclopedia Britannica who was confident their stuff can be trusted.
Rory’s report showed how to edit your Wikipedia entry - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rory_Cellan-Jones for the results (he later seems to have gifted WP a nice CC pic as compensation for the fun.)
The same day ‘El Reg’ had a nice story about WP edits - http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/04/11/trust_nobody_on_the_internet/ Some people have all the fun
Comment by luke — April 11, 2007 @ 9:06 pm
The fact that people have to in theory edit with their real names on CZ and the fact they don’t on Wikipedia is a major reason why Wikipedia IS broken so horrifically. Wikipedia is just a video game to many, because they can do whatever they want from the safety of a fake name. Essjay, anyone?
Comment by Joe Szilagyi — April 16, 2007 @ 11:45 am