Believe it or not, Wikipedia is seven years old today. Highly fallible, extremely malleable and recently much maligned, the original version of the world’s first user-written encyclopedia was put online by founders Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger on January 15, 2001. It has been an interesting seven years but the last eighteen months have been a challenging time as the experiment in people power grows into maturity.
Since its inception, the people-powered reference tool has grown rapidly with over 9 million entries recorded by December 2007. That popularity has generated extraordinary link-popularity which has propelled many Wikipedia entries to the top of search engine rankings for related keyword queries.
The concept of people informing people for the simple sake of sharing knowledge is one of the underlying philosophies of the Web. Wikipedia’s greatest accomplishment came from tapping the well of scholarly goodwill among a huge number of Web users and creating a truly useful resource from it. Unfortunately, Wikipedia’s greatest strength, its trust in the wisdom of the crowds, is also the key to its greatest weakness, abuse by some of the trusted.
For the most part, articles at Wikipedia are thought to be well researched and written but due to its open editorial policies, Wikipedia is not considered a solid reference source for information. Where a citable source such as Encyclopedia Britannica puts university professors’ names behind each researched article, Wikipedia relies on the honesty of its volunteers and the strength of their numbers. Regrettably, some people are not entirely honest.
In July 2006, a New Yorker article cited the now infamous (and former) Wikipedia editor, “Essjay†as a person, “…who holds a Ph.D. in theology and a degree in canon law and has written or contributed to sixteen thousand entries.†The piece went on to note, “A tenured professor of religion at a private university, Essjay made his first edit in February, 2005.†Essjay was a fake and Wikipedia’s credibility was shot. The biography was as false as Essjay’s credentials. He was quickly exposed as Ryan Jordan, a 24-year old college dropout. He had already created thousands of entries, each of which was now suspect, before readers researched and outed him.
Google searches frequently produce Wikipedia results in the first position creating an information chain that appears to concern some educators and librarians. They worry that the ease of finding information is lowering the skills needed to research and critically analyze multiple sources. The Google to Wikipedia information path is simply too easy and without reliable content control, Wikipedia is not academically credible.
First page placements and the chance of scoring juicy links from them, constitutes pure-gold temptation for many search engine marketers. Knowing Google is going to look kindly on links leaving the Wikipedia domain, some search marketers began adding client-focused information to Wikipedia.
Wikipedia’s link-popularity almost led to massive exploitation by clever search marketers looking for link-juice in their quests for stronger rankings. Though it is policed by its 10,000(+) person volunteer editors and 1200 volunteer administrators, the volume of new entries threatens to overwhelm even the most dedicated volunteer army. A year ago, Wikipedia added the NOFOLLOW attribute as a default to links leaving their domain in a bid to lower incentives for abuse of Wikipedia’s valuable links. Other Wiki-based projects are starting to follow suit.
Wikipedia is the sum of countless hours of dedicated work by tens of thousands of volunteers. For all its faults, it is one of the great wonders of the Web and should be acknowledge as such. It will be interesting to watch its evolution over the next seven years. Happy seventh birthday Wikipedia.
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