I think that ultimately, good behavior will need to be enforced by a feedback protocol – in a similar way to BitTorrent et al – users will only be allowed to edit a page once they’ve proven their worth via contribution.

For now, it works wonderfully. My most recent article (on a scientific topic) was edited by a 19 year old sydney native of japanese extraction, and I must admit, his corrections improved the page.

But also wikipedia reminds me of how far we’ve come from the ancient irish monks of 13 centuries ago, in cold stone rooms and with freezing hands, who with love and care, crafted every word of the bibles – every hebrew name, every letter – in black and color ink. The bible was the encyclopedia of their day, and they often took months to write a single page. In their reverie, did they imagine the global book that is our wikipedia?

If the question is, “Should a quotation from David Miller be included in the encyclopedia?” the answer is clearly no. We don’t care what David Miller says, in that sense. In fact, Wikipedia specifically prohibits adding original research or personal opinions to articles, even if presented in the third person.

If the question is, “Should we put information that David Miller supplies in the Wikipedia?” the answer should be obvious. Yes, if he has has something factual, encyclopedic, and relevant to an article. That’s the whole point of the project. Everyone knows something interesting about the universe, and its goal is to get a large number people to contribute small pieces of information until everything worth knowing (for an encyclopedia, at least) is assembled in one place. And after severar years, we can empirically say that this has resulted in the collection of a large amount of information.

If the question is, “Should we trust what David Miller has to add to Wikipedia?” the answer is, I would say, no. I’m sure some people will, and well, lots of people trust unsubstantiated rumors for no particularly good reason. Who knows who he is or where he’s getting his information? We might, however, put more faith in his claims if they have been peer-reviewed (like scientists and academics do), cites reputable sources, or has been fact-checked or independently verified (as journalists and detectives do).

So the interesting question here is, “Can we trust the Wikipedia group dynamic to purge falsehoods?” It seems like some erroneous information is removed quickly, depending on how many and what kind of people are monitoring an article, and how easy it is to check a given fact against one’s own personal knowledge. Even this level of fact-checking seems to produce a remarkably informative and accurate collection. But there are a finite number of people working on the project, which has gigabytes of facts to monitor, and so it seems to have some neglected corners. A stated long-term goal is to have articles which have been rigorously fact-checked against the authoritative sources which they cite. Even given how fast the project is currently growing, this will take years to accomplish, because it is a very labor-intensive task. But then, this is not an atypical timeframe for large reference works.

One of the interesting things about Wikipedia is that if a critic says, “Article X contains a factual error,” or “Article Y doesn’t cite its sources,” or “Article Z is poorly written,” one might always reply, “So why don’t you fix it?” I wonder, then, whether Wikipedia needs more fans, or more critics.

Any thoughts what the magic number is that will tip an entry from conjecture to real live fact?

for the record, I care what David Miller has to say.