Week in review: Wikipedia's woes

Wikipedia, the anyone-can-contribute online encyclopedia, has come under fire for recent inaccuracies, raising ethical and legal questions.

After two scandals in one week, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales changed the rules concerning who can contribute to the collaborative encyclopedia.

The scandals: First, a former administrative assistant to Robert Kennedy lambasted Wikipedia for an article that suggested he may have been involved in the assassinations of both Robert Kennedy and John Kennedy. Then, a flurry of attention came when podcasting pioneer and former MTV VJ Adam Curry was accused of anonymously editing out references to other people's seminal podcasting work in an article about the hot digital medium.

To critics of Wikipedia--which, in a spin on the open-source model, lets anyone create and edit entries--the news was further proof that the service has no accountability and no place in the world of serious information gathering.

Despite the inaccuracy of the Wikipedia entry on the Kennedy assassinations, it's unlikely that there is much of a court case against Wikipedia, according to legal experts interviewed by CNET News.com.

"Amateur editors vary widely in talent and knowledge, but mediocrity nearly always prevails at Wikipedia by the very nature of the open editing process, where consensus of opinion is valued over knowledge about the subject matter."
--Michael Berumen

Thanks to section 230 of the Federal Communications Decency Act, which became law in 1996, Wikipedia is most likely safe from legal liability for libel, regardless of how long an inaccurate article stays on the site. That's because it is a service provider as opposed to a publisher such as Salon.com or CNN.com.

Of course, Wikipedia's standing has yet to be tested in a courtroom. Until then, no one can say for certain that the site--which hosts 853,630 articles in English and in excess of a million more in dozens of other languages, and which has grown from 16,061 registered users in October 2004 to 45,351 at the end of October 2005--isn't liable for material that appears on the site.

Regardless of what the courts decide to do--if anything--confidence in the online resource may be waning. In response to accuracy concerns, The New York Times has banned reporters from using Wikipedia as a research resource, according to a posting on Poynter Online.

Opinions among CNET News.com readers appeared to be split, with some saying they don't trust Wikipedia at all to others who equated the value of the information with advice requested from a friend. Michael Berumen wrote in News.com's TalkBack forum that the service was "rife with error. Amateur editors vary widely in talent and knowledge, but mediocrity nearly always prevails at Wikipedia by the very nature of the open editing process, where consensus of opinion is valued over knowledge about the subject matter."

Other readers were a bit more sympatheic. "In a perfect world, users would ensure that every article would evolve into highly accurate content," wrote Earl Benser. "But, this is not a perfect world, and any evolution toward accuracy is more accidental than deliberate."

Worm worries
The wonderful world of worms has some new twists, but are most of us concerned? Apparently not.

A new outbreak of Sober may be coming, security experts have warned, even as e-mail systems worldwide work to get rid of the last infestation of the mass-mailing worm. The next attack is hard-coded in the version of Sober that hit the Net on Nov. 22, said iDefense, part of VeriSign.

Infected machines are set to download instructions and potentially mail out a new wave of Sober e-mails on Jan. 5. That leaves Internet users with less than a month to shore up their defenses against Sober, which was the most prolific worm in 2005.

The possible outbreak could be stopped, said Mikko Hypponen, chief research officer at Finnish antivirus company F-Secure. The worm is set to download instructions from a number of sites hosted on the systems of free Web space providers. These are located mostly in Germany and Austria, he said.

On a related front, a new worm that targets users of America Online's Instant Messenger is believed to be the first that actually chats with the intended victim to dupe the target into activating a malicious payload, IM security vendor IMlogic warned.

The worm arrives in instant messages that state: "lol thats cool"

[open-mind]

Wikipedia is like a public bulletin board.

Should bulletin boards be eliminated because anyone can post info?

If one posting is bogus, does that destroy the value of the other 99,999,999 postings that are accurate?

Should bulletin board makers be sued because people don't understand how they work?

This whole debate is absurd.

[Betty Roper]

Ouch!

Talk about damning something with faint praise.

Jimmy Wales would fall off his Aeron chair if he saw you likening his world-changing People's Reference to a community bulletin board.

Let's play your logic out... Kazaa shouldn't have been sued because it was just a place for thieves to post their warez?

[nicmart]

Wikitoids

Do millions of schoolkids search bulletin boards to locate the
"facts" for their papers? Maybe they should: the boards are no less
reliable than Wikipedia. I dub the site's errors "Wikitoids."

[Earl Benser]

Depends....

For grade school kids, Wikipedia is probably adequate. For high
Sshool kids, Wikipedia is a starting point, but verification is
necessary. For college kids, Wikipedia might provide some initial
clues, but any facts would have to come from established and
credible sources.

Wikipedia serves a purpose, but it is inherently is opinion not fact,
with no guarantee that the opinion is even close to true. That's a
severe handicap for Wikipedia, but that's the way it was built.