Wikipedia: How far can you rely on it?

One of the most well-known characters in the American TV show 30 Rock is the ditzy star of the fictional TGS programme that the comedy is about. Shattered at being sidelined by a black comedian who becomes the programme’s new star, she looks for other avenues for her creative impulses.

She finds one in a biopic of Janis Joplin. As the producers do not have the right to Joplin’s life story or the rights to her songs, the character has to change names (Janet Jimplin?) and song lyrics (the riff on Me and Bobby McGee is especially clever) have to be altered. None of this deters the star who looks for ways to get under Joplin’s skin.

Enter the show’s writers who, like all TV writers, are much cleverer than the stars. They tell her that Joplin had several interesting habits and that information about these habits is available on the internet.

The star turns to the web and discovers that Joplin was handicapped, speedwalked everywhere and ate cats. She tries very hard to live like Joplin (even attempting to bite into a cat) before the writers take pity on her and point out that all this stuff is made up.

But she had read it on the internet?

Indeed she had. She read it on Wikipedia.

All that the show’s writers had done was to alter Joplin’s Wikipedia entry to include all this nonsense about cat dinners. The unfortunate star, who trusted Wikipedia, took the line that if it was there in print, it must be true.

Welcome to the world of Wikipedia.

By now, all of us know, or should know, that Wikipedia is not the most reliable source of information. The idea of an encyclopaedia that the whole world would contribute to may be a brilliant concept but it is not one that is necessarily conducive to accuracy.

We’ve all heard horror stories of people logging on to Wikipedia to discover that they are dead. We’ve heard of the confusion caused by Wikipedia entries – one prematurely killed off Teddy Kennedy. And there have been celebrated cases of people who have been defamed by Wikipedia.

Almost anyone who has a Wikipedia page will tell you that for all the claims that Wikipedia’s founders may make about neutral umpires and guarantees against inaccuracy and defamation, any fool can vandalise your page and the damage will stay on Wikipedia for months unless you decide to take action.

So why do so many of us depend on a source of information that is so obviously inaccurate?

It’s not that we don’t know better. We’ve all heard of Wikipedia’s reputation for publishing dubious news.

But here’s the thing. Wikipedia has three huge advantages that other reference works lack.

The first is convenience. It is the easiest thing in the world to look something up on Wikipedia. And often the demands of convenience take precedence over other things, including accuracy.

The second is range. You can find almost anything on Wikipedia. Just take the references in this column: 30 Rock, Janis Joplin, Me and Bobby McGee etc. My guess is that Wikipedia will have something about all of them. How many other reference works can you say that about?

But the third, and most important, is relative accuracy. Let’s be honest.

If Wikipedia really told us that Janis Joplin was a speedwalking handicapped singer who lived on a diet of live cats, we would cease to take it seriously. In the case of some entries, Wikipedia can be hundred per cent accurate. Even when it is wrong, it can still be 70 per cent accurate.

The significance of Wikipedia lies in its standard of accuracy. Assume you were looking up L K Advani and the entry said that he was a dangerous man who functioned as an ISI double agent while simultaneously preaching Hindu communalism, you would laugh (or take offence) and not waste your time on Wikipedia again. But suppose you looked him up and every single detail of his life was accurate. But Wikipedia also carried the claim that Advani had been convicted in 1996 on corruption charges in the hawala scandal?

You and I might know that this was rubbish. All charges against Advani were thrown out. But would everyone be as aware? What about younger people who have no memories of the hawala scandal? My guess is that a significant proportion of Wikipedia users would believe that because everything else in the entry had the ring of truth about it, the bit about hawala must also be true.

Here's the real danger of Wikipedia. Because it allows every crank and every biased person with an axe to grind to spread lies and disseminate misinformation, it is the perfect medium for slander and defamation. And because most of the other information is accurate, the slander seems more credible than it would outside of the context of Wikipedia.

Is there a way out? Wikipedia’s founders said that they would prevent slander and lies from appearing on the site. Anyone who uses Wikipedia will know that they have failed. That means, I guess, that there really is no way out.

As long as Wikipedia is convenient to use, demonstrates its extraordinary range and is largely accurate, it will continue to be popular. And there, within the haystacks of truth, will lie the poisoned needles of defamation, slander and misinformation.