Column: Wikipedia criticism is unwarranted As is always the case with arguments borne of anecdotes, I'm not sure if the view I'm about to critique is wildly held, but it very much seems to me that it is. Not in the circles I run in so much but certainly just on the periphery. The view is that of the Wikipedia derider. It takes a variety of tacks but basically it treats James Whales' democratic creation as infinitely inferior to any garden-variety encyclopedia that you care to name.

A little while back I encountered a comment online that chastised Wikipedia for having a longer article on Klingon (yes, the language that the alien race speaks in Star Trek) than on Latin. This is perhaps a more subtle complaint than what one normally hears about the site: in my experience, the most oft-made claim is that Wikipedia is wildly inaccurate (and the statements of exactly how, in percentage terms, inaccurate the site is also vary wildly — after all, everyone knows 76 percent of statistics are made up on the spot). Hopefully by challenging a more subtle piece of anti-wiki sentiment, we can show that the enterprise is on fairly sure footing.

If one subscribes to the view that Wikipedia benefits from the wisdom of the crowd, then perhaps Klingon simply warrants a longer entry. To dispute this is to court elitism which, while not always bad, I think should be seen as presumptively so. Anti-elitism is a good use of presumption, by my lights. Wikipedia is a thoroughly anti-elitist enterprise and most of its user revel in this fact (setting aside the issue of whether wiki is worse on elitist topics than serious encyclopedias, it is infinitely better on matters that fall below this level of scrutiny, i.e. the vast majority of things that people are interested in).

Perhaps the argument is derivative on the idea (contrary to the suggestion in the previous paragraph) that Wikipedia is less of a democracy and more of an oligarchy? I guess the argument here would be something like: Sure, I'd concede that Klingon matters more (in some sense) than Latin if article length really communicated the preferences of the public at large, but it doesn't. In fact, article length communicates the editorial preferences of the individuals who manage the site (the oligarchs in the analogy above) and these individuals are unrepentant nerds who lack the requisite intellectual perspective to properly police their project's scope.

Assuming one only cares about elitist topics, i.e. those that fall by the wayside under the rubric of crowd wisdom, then why is it problematic that there exists an unduly long article on a topic of no relevance to one's elitist interests? Perhaps the thought is that if Wikipedia doesn't have its priorities straight (where priorities here are demonstrated by making article length proportional to importance, of some kind) then we can use this fact as reason to presumptively discredit the entire enterprise. Thus there's no need to read the wiki on Latin: we can safely conclude from the existence of a longer article on Klingon that it's not worthy of our time. This strikes me as a terrible presumption. Why would the quality of one article have any impact upon the quality of another? Let alone why would the mere existence of one article have any impact on the quality of any other?

Don't get me wrong, I frequently lament that the individuals in the world most technically capable of disseminating information often lack the taste to critically assess which information to privilege and which not to. But this is a (silly) lament about the existence of people who I feel have inferior taste and a (less silly) plea for better content on the interweb. But the existence of anime pushers doesn't inhibit my access to BBC documentaries; the absence of documentary pushers does that independently. Therefore, the only reason we have to suspect that Wikipedia's Latin article is inferior is the belief that there are no intellectuals/academics writing anything for it. And this just isn't true.