Lessig & Wikipedia

Lessig spent part of this section focusing on the somewhat taboo topic of Wikipedia. Lessig used Wikipedia as his “paradigm” example of a sharing economy, which is a relationship of give and take in which no money is involved, note this is a watered down, simplified version of what a sharing economy is. As we are all well aware of, Wikipedia is a free online encyclopedia. Anyone can access and read pages on Wikipedia, the content of the pages range wide and far in subject matter and anyone can edit a page, as long as they have a Wikipedia account. Lessig uses the Virginia Tech massacre as an example showing how quickly information can be organized and uploaded on Wikipedia. Lessig explains that over 2,000 editors worked on the page and more than 750,000 people read it in the first couple of days (161). And this is an event that occurred 5 years ago, imagine what the numbers would be for a current event in 2012.  Lessig claims that the “contributors are motivated not by money, but by the fun and joy in what they do” (162).

However herein lays the problem that academic community has identified with Wikipedia. As I said earlier, anyone can be a contributor on Wikipedia, which is both a great innovation and has huge potential to be a real issue. People who dislike the topic or person that the Wikipedia page is about can go in and create false information. For example, a few years ago, around the time Barack Obama was elected president, someone edited his Wikipedia page so that all that was written on it was the “N” word several times. There have been some changes to the editing process on Wikipedia since this incident, I do not know the details, however I have noticed that when a breaking news event happens, for example, the capture and killing of Osama bin Laden, Wikipedia has a disclaimer at the top of the page saying that it is a current and breaking news story so content will be changing frequently. They also “lock” pages. For example, when there is a big movie premiering, the first few days that it has been in theaters, Wikipedia locks the page so that people cannot add content, to avoid spoiling the plot. I’m sure there are more formal rules and regulations, but these are the ones that I am aware of.

I think Lessig should have addressed this type of issue in the book, maybe even offered a way to remedy the situation. I do want to clarify that I do not think Wikipedia is devoid of any value. In fact, I love Wikipedia; I probably visit it almost every day. I think the concept of everyone creating a collective encyclopedia is amazing. I raised these issues because as English instructors, we tell our students time and again that Wikipedia is not a reliable source. The majority of the time I read a Wikipedia page it is correct information, but the fact remains that anyone can edit a page and apparently some of these editors have nothing better to do than mess with online encyclopedia pages. So this is where my questions for the week come in.

In what ways can we alter Wikipedia so that only reliable and true information appears on pages?

I’m struggling to form a question for this, but I feel that there is a good quality group assignment that could be assigned in an English 120 class (or others, adapting to the specific class’ needs) in creating a Wikipedia page. What guidelines would be included and what things would we want emphasized?

**Just a side note - after reading this section in Lessig, I was curious, so I got on Wikipedia, clicked to a random page and then clicked on the “view history” tab. Here you can get statistics about the page as well as see who contributed to the page. You can also view the contributors’ pages, it sometimes provides a list of what pages they have contributed and sometimes they list their interests and little tidbits about them.**