by Charles Miller

Wikipedia is a free online encyclopedia with over 6 million articles, the largest reference work ever created. Since January 2001 the website has been hosted on the internet by the Wikimedia Foundation, an American nonprofit organization. The content found on www.wikipedia.org is written and maintained by volunteers among whom even anonymous individuals can participate. In spite of the fact that the Wikipedia page states that it "does not constitute a primary source" and that contributors "should not offer first-hand news reports on breaking stories" there have been some problems in this area.

In the upper-right of each Wikipedia page and sometimes also in the heading of each section of a page you will find a link named "Edit," Click on that link and YOU are instantly self-appointed as an editor of the encyclopedia. In the case of most pages, you may make any edits you want and when you click on the "Publish changes" button your revised article is immediately published for all to see. There seems to be a substantial number of readers who do this. I myself have made a handful of corrections when I have found factual errors. This process is intended to be self-auditing because you can also click on the "History" link to see a chronological record of all changes to a page.

The recent passing of Pope Francis followed by the election of his successor is a good example of how this can go wrong. In a blog posting, not on Wikipedia, one contributor wrote of what could only be described as a dopamine high they experienced upon being the very first to edit Pope Francis' page to simply change the present tense "is" to past tense "was" in the first sentence. What followed were many more contributors' edits.

Later things got really messy. Mere moments after Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost was announced as the new Pope on May 8, a contributor who obviously never studied Roman numerals in grade school created a new Wikipedia page titled "Pope Leon XIIV" quickly followed by someone else renaming Cardinal Prevost's previously existing page to "Pope Leo XIV." Adding to an already-confusing situation was the fact that Wikipedia already had an existing page titled "Leo XIV" describing the conclavism claimant regarded as an antipope. These pages were the target of a massive spike in traffic, over 7.5 million views the day of the announcement of our new Pope. Even the incorrectly-named XIIV page received over 10,000 visits during the short time it existed. That first day contributors made over a thousand edits at a rate of a dozen a minute to the pontiff's new page. Well-meaning contributors pushed out spelling errors, factual errors, and even a photo of the wrong Cardinal. The results were disorganized, to put it politely.

Wikipedia's open-editing model permits anyone to write and publish anything without citing any source, and that often means current events get written about in real time with no sourcing. It can also result in a lot of back-and-forth as the "History" feature allows reversing changes with the click of a mouse, meaning anyone can simply undo anyone else's edits they do not like… and then the original editor could do the same to undo the undo. There also exists a certain amount of robot-driven editing by companies that try to automatically reverse what they view as "unapproved" edits to their pages.

In spite of shortcomings in its editing policies, Wikipedia is and will probably continue to be the go-to source for millions of internet users because most of the information found there is verifiably accurate. In the interest of transparency encouraged by Wikipedia in acknowledging source material, I will offer that several mainstream media news sites such as nytimes.com were consulted while writing this column as was the Wikipediocracy.com watchdog site that chronicles criticisms of Wikipedia.

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Charles Miller is a freelance computer consultant with decades of IT experience and a Texan with a lifetime love for Mexico. The opinions expressed are his own. He may be contacted at 415-101-8528 or email FAQ8 (at) SMAguru.com.

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