April 27, 2007, Wicked wiki, By Charles Miller

When I was a boy, my parents always bought the new edition of the World Book Encyclopedia®. My brother, sister and I were encouraged to use it and we spent many evenings at home reading through one interesting article after another.

One day when the Dallas Morning News and the Marshall News Messenger arrived at the house, they had identical front-page photographs with a caption written by Associated Press. I knew the information to be historically incorrect and so I checked this in the encyclopedia. I wrote a letter to AP informing them of their error and including attribution. I naively expected them to acknowledge and correct their error, but they never responded and never printed a retraction. After I had written to AP three times, I realized it was really easy for them to ignore me.

Now, fast-forward a few decades to 2007, and the way people are getting their information is going through a real transformation. A growing percentage of people are getting most of their news via the internet rather than traditional newspaper and broadcast networks. This is especially true here in San Miguel where we have less access to these traditional media outlets.

An increasingly popular web site is www.wikipedia.org, “the free encyclopedia.” This site is an amazing resource including more than a million articles covering every subject you might imagine. The element that makes Wikipedia so different from the encyclopedia you might have on a CD-ROM is that it is an encyclopedia written collaboratively by its readers.

Wikipedia uses a special type of website, called a “wiki,” which is a Hawaiian word for “fast.” This technology makes collaboration easy and manageable. It is possible for anyone using Wikipedia to change, add to, or delete content from any article. The changes you make are immediately available to millions of other users of the site. Thousands of such changes are made per hour. Wikipedia encourages users to “find something that can be improved, either in content, grammar or formatting, and fix it.”

As great as this sounds, the concept is not without a dark side. Wiki sites such as Wikipedia can be the target of vandalism when users post false or misleading information to the site. Usually, this gets quickly corrected and the vandal can be banned from future editing. Wikipedia “locks” some controversial pages to prevent vandalism or constant revisions by competing positions.

All changes are logged to a history file so that the administrators of the web site know who was responsible. Inappropriate changes are usually removed quickly, and the responsible contributor can be blocked in the future. There are many users who monitor recent changes.

The controversy over this made the news last year when someone posted false information to the Wikipedia biography of noted journalist John Seigenthaler Sr. implicating him in the assassination of President Kennedy. The vandalism went unnoticed for months. When it was finally noticed, Mr. Seigenthaler was not amused and has voiced his concerns about the potential for wiki abuse.

For now though, I am allowed to edit any of the Wikipedia pages. The other night I found an historical error, verified this elsewhere, and then edited the page to correct the mistake. I did not have to write to Associated Press only to be ignored once again.

Charles Miller is a freelance computer consultant, a frequent visitor to San Miguel since 1981 and now practically a full-time resident. He may be contacted at 044-415-101-8528 or email FAQ@SMAguru.com.