Our notions about privacy and just what about ourselves we can keep private are rapidly becoming obsolete in an age when massive commercial databases seem to share information without restraint. Why, one wonders then, is this such a problem for federal law enforcement?

But I do like the ZIP code information along with the address and phone number.

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.

In its July 31, 2006, issue The New Yorker ran “Know It All,” an article by Stacy Schiff, a Pulitzer Prize winning biographer (who curiously is not yet the subject of a Wikipedia article). She explores the epistemology (in a crude reduction, the wisdom of the masses vs. the knowledge and authority of experts–Marx vs. Plato?) inherent in Wikipedia and how that position evolved from Jimmy Wales's initial vision of a comprehensive, free, and authoritative Web-based encyclopedia.

Hot on its heels is historian Marshall Poe's “the Hive” in the September 2006 issue of The Atlantic. Poe describes the evolution of Wikipedia and its increasing discovery of the need for policy and, dare I say, referees?

And not least–at least in terms of the ink it has received elsewhere–there is Jim Giles's December 15, 2005 comparison in Nature (sorry, subscribers only) of Britannica and Wikipedia. Or, as it has been cast in the popular press and over time, Wikipedia vs. Britannica. Giles was a speaker at Wikimania. He placed his article in the context of journalism, not research. A careful listener with a truly NPOV (”neutral point of view,” a value Wikipedia embraces) would learn that it was not the knock-out punch that many Wikipedians believed. At best, having an equal number of factual errors as Britannica and topic-for-topic scientific articles is at best a Pyrrhic victory. As Giles noted, some of the referees in Nature's blind process reported that some articles from Wikipedia were difficult to follow and less coherent than the Britannica articles. Blogging from Wikimania's Harvard Law School venue, Meredith Farkas reported on Giles's session. She notes that “What I got out of this is that the idea of authority is a really murky one and should take much more than accuracy into account.” What I got out of it was Giles's admission that factual accuracy is not the only criterion by which to judge encyclopedia articles. Factual accuracy is the gold standard for almanacs, but is just one of several relevant criteria for judging the value of encyclopedias. Coherence and readability are criteria at least as valuable! Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales himself called upon Wikipedians to shift their focus from racking up quantities of edits, telling them that “We can no longer feel satisfied and happy when we see these [article] numbers going up…. We should continue to turn our attention away from growth and towards quality.”

With wit and wisdom, Stephen Colbert has put his finger on Wikipedia's potentially pernicious effect–i.e., mob rule. Even though Poe cites the entry on himself as proof that Wikipedia's processes work in favor of truth, it is conceivable that eventually Wikipedians could canonize by consensus the “truth” that Iraq had WMDs and who knows what other majority-held opinions masquerading as truth.

A consensus process confers new meanings on words or strips them of meanings. Language usage evolves organically. Knowledge of our world evolves through very different processes, processes in which ultimately authority matters. It is the authority of the one who can demonstrate proof, not the authority of rank, title, or position. This is, of course, much clearer in the natural sciences, though even there newer, more demonstrable knowledge supplants older knowledge. It is murkier in fields such as the humanities. Nevertheless debate based on theory and research matters in the humanities. That debate can never be isolated from opinion. Critical thinking and judgment must be applied to sort them out.