Wikipedia is a large, multilingual online encyclopaedia. Anyone can add new pages to it or complete and correct the ones already existing.

Wikipedia and similar websites are made possible by special software programs called wiki, which were created just to facilitate the collaborative authoring of large collections of texts through the Internet. The great ease of use of wiki software and the huge amount of content loaded into Wikipedia are the two main reasons why it became extremely popular in just a few years.

This popularity, however, is partly based on a few assumptions which are sometimes accepted as self-evident truths, while they often have no real basis in reality or are just hopes of Wikipedia fans. The problem is that, all too often these days, Wikipedia is used by too many students of all ages (and adults too) as the only necessary and sufficient source of knowledge. Therefore, it is important that all parents and teachers clearly understand the limits of those assumptions.

The purpose of this article is to explain those limits. A second, shorter article will give practical advice on how to limit the misuse of Wikipedia at school or in the family, at least when study is concerned.

1. Accuracy and quality of Wikipedia pages are always good or very good, surely improve over time and style doesn't really matter

First of all, even Wikipedia itself makes no claim of accuracy.

Generally speaking, those who believe that accuracy, style and quality don't matter, or matter much less than getting information, any information, quickly... deserve what they get. Style and consistency make anything much easier to read and understand.

As far as accuracy is concerned, the semi-chaotic model of development (bazaar) can be great with software. When everybody, without any central coordination or experience, adds a contribution to a software program or checks its behavior, the final result will eventually be great. But this is because the quality of a program is much, much easier to measure objectively, without any expertise or particular check. If a program runs faster, crashes less or has more useful functions after a change, that change was a good one, otherwise it wasn't.

Quality or lack of quality of written text, instead, are much more difficult to measure. If most contributors are from the general public, it is obvious that it will be difficult to write and maintain really good stuff. Lots of ill-informed people with lots of time on their hands don't necessarily give you a good answer.

Any unrestricted collaborative environment is extremely vulnerable to whoever joined without enough knowledge, talent, time or good will to actually improve it: it wouldn't make sense to consider it as an authoritative, sufficient source.

On an unrestricted wiki there is no guarantee that if you are a real expert on some subject and improve a related article it will remain that way, without becoming unreadably disorganized or filled with errors. Academics surely edit Wikipedia or any equally open wiki much less than the general public exactly because they know it can be rewritten.

Good style and consistency, that is the things that make much easier to really understand and remember what you read, are very likely to deteriorate as an article written by a few skilled volunteers is contaminated from a mass of random, uncoordinated or correct but ugly "written by committee" edits. Sure, other Wikipedia volunteers can revert changes, but often they don't, for the obvious reason that they are not paid to do something so boring, unglamorous and, by definition, endless.

The lack of coordination and official responsibles for any set of articles also makes it unavoidable that, even when there are no conflicts among contributors, it is impossible to enforce consistency across the whole work. An example of this problem is reported here

A few years ago the founder himself of Wikipedia acknowledged that Wikipedia needs to embrace real experts. Without them, broadening Wikipedia's reach and contributors base may just degrade its quality. Even the "Featured Articles" are subject to this risk.

2. Errors are always detected and corrected before they can do any damage

Rumor has it that it only takes an average of 4 minutes for vandalism to get corrected on any Wikipedia article. So what? Do you let your children get away with leaving the door open in a wind or rain storm, only because you can quickly clean everything a few minutes after? At least in theory, additions which are evident nonsense, vandalism or other falsehoods should never be allowed in the first place into an encyclopaedia: why waste time by inviting them?

If an article is being too frequently edited and re-adjusted (a phaenomenon known as "revert war"), we are told that it's no problem, because eventually the article is frozen and visitors informed of the reason. But this only happens after a lot of people wasted their time on it, as it happened, for example, in the Web wars over Milwaukee ferries:

.a Wikipedia article about the Milwaukee-based ferry has been altered repeatedly to emphasize the vessel's cancellations, delays, mechanical problems and passengers' seasickness - and to link to a Web site that compared the Lake Express unfavorably to the competing S.S. Badger.

More importantly, it is just foolish to believe that the majority of people who come to consult Wikipedia to quickly learn something will know how to check a page history or, above all, recognize when the content of a page is suspect enough to check its history: how could they? Encyclopaedias are useful because they make you save time, not waste it. You don't go to them to read stuff you already know.

3. The neutral point of view

An Encyclopaedia should be impartial. Theoretically, all Wikipedia entries are presented from a Neutral Point of View (NPOV) or should magically arrive at it thanks to semi-random edits by equally random, unknow editors. In practice, since there is no central control and coordination, Wikipedia makes it very likely that articles simply present the opinions of the person with more free time on his or her hands, more determination to present his or her point of view or both. This doesn't mean that traditional encyclopaedias are surely immune from this problem. It means, however, that it is foolish to believe that Wikipedia, only because everybody can edit it, automatically presents or approaches a Neutral Point of View on any topic.

4. Is popularity equal to quality?

No, as reality shows prove every day. For many of its contributors and adepts, Wikipedia seems instead an already successful attempt to prove that passionate amateurs can do just as good a job as experts who really know
what they're talking about - or editors who can write a readable entry.

The underlying, inherently flawed assumption is that popularity is a good substitute for competent peer review, that is that you can vote for the truth (even Wikipedia itself has an entry for this). Pretty scaring,isn't it? Especially when you think it's the same thing we do when voting, but that is another issue and certainly not a reason to get rid of universal suffrage.

5. Never confuse good tools with good results

Wiki software can be excellent for efficient collaborative authoring by a closed team of editors. This doesn't mean at all that something created in that way is automatically good, nor that it gets better as more and more unknown people edit and contribute, that all contributions will be good and in good faith, or that a Wiki is always the fastest way to increase and spread human knowledge.

Typing monkeys can produce a Shakespeare sonnet eventually, but it's a terribly inefficient way to have good poetry. Especially if the monkeys can keep overwriting the sonnet after they managed to put it together... In other words, investing time and energy in maintaining a Wikipedia page may very well be one of the most inefficient ways to make the world a better place.

When, instead, people who do know what they're talking about choose wiki software to build and continually review together a source of common knowledge or a set of textbooks, then the result is much more likely to be good, improve humanity and happen much faster than with any other tool. But that is just because development doesn't happen in a totally open, unprotected and unregulated environment.

6. Long Term Dangers

In spite of all the problems we just listed, today even many people who have no direct interest or active participation in Wikipedia regularly include links to Wikipedia entries in their websites or school projects, either as proofs of what they say or as worthwhile, more in depth reading on the subject. This happens even when a few extra minutes of research may have found original or much more authoritative sources for the same topic.

This habit has two dangerous effects: the first is that, since so many independent web pages link to Wikipedia entries, Wikipedia regularly ends up at the top of most online searches looking every day more authoritative when a great part of that "authority" is simply lazyness or ignorance from the authors of those links.

The consequence is that students doing homework, who are often likely to just memorize or copy without thinking the first result returned by a search engine, end up "learning" from Wikipedia pages and nothing else. If everybody cites it, it must be correct and complete, right? So much for learning to learn seriously.

On a worldwide scale, both Wikipedia and cheap, continuous Internet access are still enough recent and/or relatively uncommon that no real damage has been already done. Besides this, the fact that an unregulated Wiki cannot really assure the production of reliable primary sources is still widely accepted and regularly repeated by today's teachers.

The risk, however, is that unregulated wikis become recognized and accepted as just as valid as today's peer-review academic publishing. The thought of such beliefs and methods entrenching itself with the next generation of scientists is terrifying. Let's not forget that Wikipedia is not peer-reviewed in the classical sense. It is not a replacement for peer-reviewed research. It is not a replacement for primary sources. Even its own founder discourages academic use of Wikipedia.

Conclusion: what should you do with Wikipedia?

Should you ignore Wikipedia? Not really: the really serious problem with Wikipedia is not so much Wikipedia itself, but the way too many people see, perceive and advertise it, especially when this happens (or is tolerated) in schools.

This said, there are meaningful uses for Wikipedia. First of all, it is a good way to have a general idea of what some term means, something which will help you to perform focused, much more effective searches for primary sources of information on the corresponding topics.

Another big merit I personally find in Wikipedia is that it has became a very effective way to preserve local dialect and many "minor", sometimes disappearing languages. The actual content of pages in these languages and dialect has, of course, the same general limits we just dscussed. Nevertheless, providing a very easy, quick and highly visible way to create and increase over time a de-facto glossary and grammar reference of (theoretically) every conceivable dialect is a very Good Thing!

Coming soon: the Parents' Guide to Wikipedia