Is the majority always right?
Since I have known Wikipedia, I never really knew what to think about it. After the surprise about the concept, and thinking that it was a brilliant idea, I started wondering if the idea was so good actually.
In some fields, people called "specialists" deserve their status and seeing random people writing elaborated articles in these fields can be a problem. Another thing that is a problem to me is that Wikipedia is always the first response in a google research and that it tends to become one of the most trusted and cited website. Such a monopole in the field of human knowledge seems dangerous to me. As I ask in the title of this article : "is the majority always right?". History shows us that it is not the case. To take an extreme example : people who pretended that Earth was round, or that Earth was not the center of the Universe, were alone against the rest of the world to defend their theory. What I want to say can be resumed in this sentence of the Lanier's article : "But it is not infinitely useful. The collective can be stupid, too. "
On the other hand, the debates opened by some modifications on some Wiki articles are often interesting and I have to admit that these sort of debates may not exist without a website like that.
For a long time, I tried to resist to this monopole and I tried to avoid Wikipedia at all cost, prefering finding other sources, confronting them etc... like we all used to do. However, slowly but surely, I went more and more on Wikipedia and I edited my first article a few months ago. I've done that very rarely, and it generally concerns biographies or information about bands that I know well. Here is an example :http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blonde_Redhead
In the biography of the band, I added a lot of details about the producer Guy Picciotto, like the song on which he sings and things like that. I have done that for a few other bands. I think my entries always respect the neutrality because I add actual facts, that can be easily verified, and none of my modifications ended in a discussion or have been deleted.
Concerning the free marketing, I think that people in the field of publicity understood that consumers are sick of tv commercials, ads in magazine, and they have to find new technics. I am not a huge fan of the publicity in general, but as a student in communications, I have to admit that some ideas are very smart. When someone creates an entry about the subserviant chicken on Wikipedia, he makes some advertising for BK, consiously or unconsiously. I am sure people from BK expected that, and the only thing I have to tell them is : congratulations!
Comments
Nice post Pierre
You mentioned how Wikipedia comes up first in a Google search. For most sites that offer a search function, the results are sometimes ranked based on payments to the search engine. It is almost like the end aisle displays at a grocery store. The company for the product has paid a fee for that position.
Mike
Posted by: md2506 | March 28, 2007 09:16 PM
It seems almost counterproductive to have a Wikipedia entry be the first thing that comes up on a Google search. After all, when I do research on Google, I'm generally trying to avoid Wikipedia since it isn't a reputable source for most college classes. When I do use it, I typically go right to one of the other sources cited on the page rather than using Wikipedia itself.
Posted by: Carl Cassel | April 1, 2007 10:15 PM