Fact-checking and collaboration in the age of Wikipedia
MANILA, Philippines — Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge,” Wikimedia founder Jimmy Wales famously explained in a 2004 interview. “That’s what we’re doing.”
Wales may have sounded a bit naïve, but even back in 2004, Wikipedia was already pretty successful. Wikipedia already had 15,907 volunteer-written articles and was quickly earning a reputation as the high school researchers’ information resource of choice. And by December 2018, a decade and a half later, Wikipedia had grown by a mind-blowing 7,815 percent, with 1,259,056 separate articles.
It has become the fifth most visited website in the world (seventh in the Philippines) alongside such day-to-day staples as Facebook and Yahoo. If one Google’s a certain topic, Wikipedia will usually be the first item in your results.
Because it’s so popular, and because smartphones have made it so accessible, Wikipedia has basically changed the way contemporary societies process facts. And because it’s so influential, it’s important to take a closer look at the question of its accuracy and to examine the process by which it validates the information that goes onto its many articles.
Volunteers and consensus building
The key to Wikipedia’s success is the fact that it’s built by volunteers. While the Wikimedia foundation hosts the site’s servers, it doesn’t control any of the content on the site. Unpaid and mostly anonymous, these volunteers write the articles, check them for accuracy, polish their prose, verify that they are reliably sourced, and so on.
Because all these writers and editors have to work together, Wikipedia has had to develop rules for how its various volunteers can settle disagreements. Understanding this consensus-building process is key to understanding Wikipedia.
If you want an example that’s relevant to the Philippines, all you have to do is google the Wikipedia discussion page at “Wikipedia:Tambayan_Philppines.” There you’ll find an ongoing discussion venue where a little more than 400 Filipino “Wikipedians” — with noms-de-plume like “Boracay Bill” or “Sky Harbor,” — debate things like whether a Zaide textbook is outdated, whether an “OIC” or “Interim” Director is the same thing, or whether individual barangays are notable enough to deserve their own article.
Taking a close look at the conversation archives is like taking a crash course on the rules that are arguably behind Wikipedia’s success. These rules shape the behavior of individual editors, create a framework settling disputes, enable editors to coordinate tasks, and ultimately mold a culture for the community.
A close look at the way Wikipedia community’s rules can be very instructive since they effectively foreshadow the future of fact-checking in an increasingly crowdsourced world.
It’s impossible to go through Wikipedia’s many rules in a single article, of course, but a quick sampling can be very instructive. (And besides, interested readers can turn to Wikipedia:Policies_and_guidelines to learn more.)
Neutral point of view
When addressing Philippines-related topics, however, perhaps no Wikipedia policy is harder to enforce than the one that says articles should be written from a neutral point of view (Wikipedia:Neutral).
Filipino discourse has become a lot less flowery and sentimental after the advent of new media, but many novice editors struggle to accept prose, which they feel is “restrictive.” And it doesn’t help that many of the most popular newspapers and books read by Filipinos are popular precisely because they use “colorful” language, full of superlatives and verbal flourishes.
In fact, debates with novice Filipino editors on the matter of neutrality often require experienced editors to look up the guidelines for “dealing with incivility.”
But can you trust it?
But it’s one thing to understand that Wikipedia’s rules work. It’s another thing entirely to believe that those rules produce reliably accurate output. Can you trust Wikipedia as a source of reliable information?
Perhaps the most important thing to remember is that encyclopedias, including Wikipedia, are what liberarians call “tertiary literature.” They collate information from numerous sources so that researchers can use them as a guide to the literature. In that sense, teachers are right to tell students not to use Wikipedia. But any good librarian will tell you that the same is true of all encyclopedias, dictionaries, almanacs, and so on — not just Wikipedia.
Tertiary literature like Wikipedia isn’t there to give you answers. It’s there to help you do become more effective at doing research on your own. And ultimately, maybe that’s the future of fact-checking in the age of crowdsourcing: we won’t be doing any less of it. We’ll actually be doing a whole lot more — just more effectively with the help of sites like Wikipedia. - Remi E. De Leon
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Remi E. de Leon is a writer, social entrepreneur, development advocate and former Professor of Development Communication who has been writing Wikipedia articles for a decade and a half now. He currently serves as Communication Officer for Research at the Center for Research and Communication in Ortigas, Pasig.
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To know more about the CRC, visit crc.uap.asia or email CRC at crc@uap.asia.
