Don’t Panic it’s Wikipedia
Wikipedia as a source of casual knowledge may be helpful, but when it comes down to the facts and nitty-gritty details there are major problems and your professors are right.
So you’d think that Wikipedia is curated and created on a gigantic collective basis from people around the world. In the article titled Who The Hell Writes Wikipedia, Anyway? Henry Blodget, CEO of Business Insider describes the constantly changing information base of Wikipedia. Henry states that “The bulk of the changes to the original text,”, “are made by a core group of heavy editors who make thousands of tiny edits (the 1400 freaks)”. These edits are what make the articles you read what they are today and the scariest thing is that small base of people editing the information billions of people read daily.
That leaves room for problems. Huge ones such as who is being heard because even in a sea of 1400 people there are others being marginalized in that group. In this group there is chaos and it’s more of what you’d picture 10 teenage kids trying to determine where to eat after a football game than organized intellectuals providing the most up-to-date information on the Democratic Party. In the past there were many people editing and changing for the better of Wikipedia, but now in the past decade it seems like those voices who were not hear are leaving in droves.
Stagnation
One of the biggest issues facing Wikipedia today is its declining editor base. According to Tom Simonite’s article titled, The Decline of Wikipedia from the MIT Technology Review the volunteer workforce that has built wikipedia and maintained it through hardship is on an decline, shrinking “by more than a third since 2007 and is still shrinking”. But why has the editor base shrunk so much? Well, as Simonite states, “The loose collective running the site today, estimated to be 90 percent male, operates a crushing bureaucracy with an often abrasive atmosphere that deters newcomers who might increase participation in Wikipedia and broaden its coverage”. It’s not surprising that people are skeptical of working with them and that the people running this bureaucracy are running out of steam to actually continue to edit. At the of it all you’re left with very few people.
Wikipedia has tried to get newcomers to get onboard. A blogger for Wikipedia, Steven Walling goes over initiatives to help newcomers ease into the Wikipedia community in his article titled, New draft feature provides a gentler start for Wikipedia articles. This draft feature where according to Steven Walling, new editors can “get constructive feedback from other editors” has been quite successful and this has helped Wikipedia maintain and recruit fresh people.
A Gender Problem and Some Shocking Data
Gender diversity in the 21st century is a problem for Wikipedia that they are trying to fix. Data from a 2011 survey by the Wikimedia Foundation found that, “fewer than 13% of contributors to Wikipedia are women” and 90% of Wikipedia editors are predominately male. But why do so few women choose to edit on Wikipedia? From the article titled Why Do So Few Women Edit Wikipedia by Nicole Torres, it’s apparent that the women on Wikipedia are “reacting more negatively to critical feedback than men”. Women as a whole are more negatively impacted by the critical feedback and choose to edit less so they can avoid this. Nicole Torres also points out that, “critical feedback can have a stronger effect on women’s self-esteem” and this only makes them want to post and edit less. With most men voicing their opinions this leaves feminism or historically important women in the dark.
