Last week I began writing The Truth About Wikipedia. In that article I shared a few of the things that the Wikipedia model does well. Today I want to share some of the things I think it does poorly. Remember, I’m using Wikipedia is a microcosm of the wiki model which says that truth can best be captured by relying on the masses; the wiki model allows anyone and everyone to create and edit information. Along the way I’m drawing a few inevitable comparisons between Wikipedia as the vanguard of the new model and Encyclopedia Britannica as the vanguard of the old.

It ignores human nature. The wiki supposes that humans are generally good and that they will work together to achieve the greatest good for the greatest number. This ignores what the Bible tells us, though, that as sinful humans we are predominantly selfish, looking out for our own good ahead of the good of others. While our individual actions may assist others, we are still inherently and essentially sinful. We are not good people who occasionally do bad things, but bad people who sometimes do good things. The wiki model has had to account for human nature and respond to it in different ways, even ways that seem to cast the whole model in doubt. As just one example, certain pages have become so controversial or have seen so much vandalism that they have been locked so only administrators can edit them.

It offers too little review. The sheer volume of information that tends to accumulate when this model is successful makes it impossible to patrol it all, to ensure quality and accuracy. As of a few weeks ago Wikipedia had just 1,742 administrators tasked with overseeing more than 3 million English articles; tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of articles may be changed on any given day. Though there are no set qualifications to take on this position, administrators have the final say over articles, determining if they must be locked down, if they must be changed or if they must be deleted. When we have a model that ignores human nature and combine it with too little oversight, we will inevitably run into problems related to the misuse of authority. Wikipedia admits the failings in its model when it writes "In particular, older articles tend to be more comprehensive and balanced, while newer articles more frequently contain significant misinformation, unencyclopedic [sic] content, or vandalism. Users need to be aware of this to obtain valid information and avoid misinformation that has been recently added and not yet removed." And yet this warning is buried deep within the Wikipedia system. Very few people who use the site and read its articles are aware that newer articles frequently contain "significant misinformation."

It is too subjective. In 2007 Virgil Griffith released a tool he called WikiScanner. The purpose of this tool was to link Wikipedia edits with the computer addresses of the people or organizations who had made changes to articles. The results were stunning, showing that many corporations and politicians, those with a vested interest in a certain topic, were constantly monitoring and changing articles within Wikipedia. Computers from within the headquarters of the Church of Scientology had removed critiques of the church from within the article on Scientology; computers from within the Vatican were alleged to have changed an article on Sinn Fein president Gerry Adams. The anonymity of Wikipedia and the way in which it allows anyone to edit articles necessarily means that people will seek to protect their own interests in the world's most important repository of information. Some believe that as wikis are left to mature, objectivity will increase. I find this difficult to believe. As wikis mature their importance will increase and thus it will become ever-more important for each of us that they contain not necessarily what is true about us but what we want others to believe is the truth.

God is true. God is truth. God is entirely without error, entirely true in all he is, in all he knows, in all he commands. He is the source of all that is true and right. As beings made in his image, we are to reflect his truth, to value what is true and turn from what is error. Truth leads to God, error leads to Satan, for it is Satan who is the first liar and the father of lies (John 8:44). Wayne Grudem offers this warning: "In a society that is exceedingly careless with the truthfulness of spoken words, we as God's children are to imitate our Creator and take great care to be sure that our words are always truthful." Lying is an abomination to God because it mocks his truth. And while factual errors may not carry the same level of moral culpability as outright lies, while they may be unintentional, they are still lies, still pointing to a false reality. They still dishonor God.

I thought about these things as I was working on the manuscript for my forthcoming book on technology. I thought about how we encounter truth in the world today, how we determine what is true and what is false. And naturally my thoughts led me to Wikipedia. It led me to pour a lot of thought into Wikipedia and into the reality that Wikipedia may well now be our culture’s primary arbiter of truth. What does this mean to the Christian? Is Wikipedia a source of truth? And what does it mean that as a society we now believe that a wiki model is the best way to determine what is true?

Today and tomorrow I want to write about Wikipedia a little bit, seeing it as a microcosm of the way our society determines truth—truth by consensus.

Because of its popularity and the way it takes advantage of the elements that cause web pages to be most noticeable to search engines, Wikipedia is very often the first or second search result returned by search engines. I recently glanced at the pages of the books spread out before me, chose some words and performed a Google search for each. Knowledge, authority, and affair all showed a page from Wikipedia as the very first result. Truth, history and power all had the entry appear as the second result. Turning to words of theological concern I found that Jesus, God, justification, Christianity and baptism also all lead first to Wikipedia. This shows that Wikipedia is now the first to answer many of our most important questions, questions about truth, authority, knowledge, wisdom, power, God and salvation. Its 15 million articles draw in 75 million visitors every month. Wikipedia tells the world what is true.

Wikipedia's success has spawned a long list of imitators, other sites that maintain a similar look and feel but, more importantly, the same wiki format (a wiki is a type of site in which the users create and edit the content; it depends not on a few experts but on an army of amateurs and enthusiasts like you and me). Because Wikipedia has cornered the market as a general repository of information, most of the imitators are more narrow in scope, catering to just one discipline, whether science or theology. Even dictionaries have become open, with the definitions of words and phrases determined by the crowds (For example, Wiktionary is a lexical extension to Wikipedia while Urban Dictionary is a collection of slang and hip terms). The wiki model is increasingly regarded as the best means of arriving at truth, at building a repository of knowledge.