Last summer Stephen Colbert demonstrated that Wikipedia's policy of allowing anonymous revision allows, at least briefly, for truthiness to prevail over fact. It was amusing and pro- and anti-Wikipedia partisans found evidence in the incident to buttress their views (or, perhaps, their own truthiness?).

There are better illustrations of the the weakness and the strength of WIkipedia policy and practice. John Seigenthaler dramatically exposed its weakness in his November, 2005, USA Todayarticle about the character assasination attempted on him in his Wikipedia biography.
More recently in a piece in the November 17, 2006, Chronicle of Higher Education, Ann Kirschner of CUNY related her experience of creating a Wikipedia artcile on Ala Gertner, “who was hanged publicly at Auschwitz in 1945 for her role in the only armed uprising at the camp.” Others edited and added information to her article. She concluded that “After my experience receiving an excellent assist from this anonymous knowledge army, I'm prepared to believe that Wikipedia's millions of eyes will continue its evolution and improve its quality.” Both tales can be interpreted as demonstrations that Wikipedia's editorial approach works. One, however, is also a cautionary tale.

That approach does not, however work uniformly. For example, the article on novelist Ian McEwan cries out for the treatment Kirschner's article has received. It focuses on tabloid controversies about his personal life and his alleged plagiarism in Atonement. As for analysis of his works, his narrative technique, his character development, his contribution to the art of the novel–not a word. The article cites awards his works have won as if those facts substitute for analysis. The editing history shows numerous minor changes, few of them more substantive than correcting an ISBN. Wikipedia simply does not provide insight about McEwan's notable body of work. Furthermore, the writing wierdly yokes the imaginary and the biographical (“Henry Perowne, the main character, lives in a house on a square in central London where McEwan himself lives after relocating from Oxford.”) One sentence ambigouosly implies that the still living McEwan has been “the focus of a posthumous controversy.” The Wikipedia process isn't working on this article!

That brings me back to Wissner-Goss's new software. NewScientist.com reports that this Google-like tool

assesses page popularity by examining the number of other pages that link to it and also the popularity of those pages. Another algorithm, that examines the number of links needed to get from one article to another.

It quotes Wissner-Gross as saying

“If I have a medical student who's particularly interested in neuroscience, I could custom-generate a list of reading suited to them,” he says.

This rests on faith in the Wikipedia editorial process and faith that Wikipedia’s users, in their selections that generate articles’ popularity, add as much value as editors added to Kirschner’s article. What if someone uses this tool to generate a Wikipedia reading list on contemporary British fiction and the list includes the aeanemicnemic McEwan article? This places responsibility for judging content value where it ultimately belongs–with the end user, with the reader.

When Wikipedia is good, it can be very good. See, for example, its article on hurricanes. Then it can be very bad as it certainly was for a time with the Seigenthaler article. And it can be something less than mediocre as it is today with the McEwan article. And that leads to the weakness of Wissner-Goss's new software–it limits itself to the Wikipedia universe of information. It may be Google-like, but its is less useful than Google since Google searches a larger universe. Yet, as useful as Google is (I think I have used it to advantage half a dozen times so far today), it misses much of the information universe. So far, the best mediator between the vast online and the vast print information worlds is the library and its helpful staff who understand the strengths and limitations of both world and can help others find needed information without limiting the search to either universe.