Tyra Saxton
Dr. Aaiij
ENGL1020
13 April 2021
Argumentative Paper
Depending on who you ask, Wikipedia is a fairly reliable database. Reliable can be defined as trustworthy or dependable. There are many editors that fact check the articles that are written up and there are rules and regulations set in place to prevent vandalism and false or biased information from being published. However, Wikipedia can be deemed biased or inaccurate due to the unbalanced number of gender in regards to editors or because of the content gap about certain topics such as cultures, gender, or ethnic groups. Wikipedia is not necessarily unreliable, it is just lacking diversity and variety in content.
The backbone of Wikipedia is the individual contributions of volunteers. Individual attitudes, behaviors, and knowledge consequently have a strong impact. Its total content has grown rapidly since its inception in 2001, with 44 million articles across 295 languages, including 5.4 million in English as of May 2017. After initial exponential growth of key topics, the English Wikipedia has slowed down as more niche topics and current events are added. These articles are written and edited by a community of approximately 30,000 editors that make more than five edits per month, and 3,000 that make more than one-hundred edits per month.
For instance, if you needed to look up medical information, Wikipedia is more than trustworthy. Wikipedia is one of the most commonly read online sources of medical information, and is consistently among the top ten most viewed websites in the world. It is also used as a source of healthcare information by fifty to seventy percent of physicians and over ninety percent of medical students. Its medical content, community, collaborations, and challenges have been improving since its creation in 2001. Although content can be edited by anyone, medical articles are primarily written by a core group of medical professionals. As of March 2017 there are 30,000 articles on medical topics in English Wikipedia, and another 164,000 in other languages. They are collectively read more than ten million times a day. This extreme readership is only approximated by a few other resources, including the US National Institutes of Health and WebMD.
According to different studies, as little as eight to sixteen percent of editors are female. These numbers may be somewhat distorted, as some females may choose to opt out of surveys or conceal their gender online in a community that is generally perceived as dominated by males. One possible explanation for this is that Wikipedia is quite conflict-driven and the critical cooperative environment in which it thrives deters many female editors. On Wikipedia, this problem has dire consequences and also many layers. For instance, biographies of women on Wikipedia are less developed. In fact, there is a Wikiproject entitled, “Women in Red” that lists notable American women with no articles written up. The Wikipedian community also occasionally displays plain sexism; for instance, at some point, a separate ‘American women novelists’ category was created whereas male writers remained in the general ‘American novelists’ category. The problem is not only that there are considerably fewer female editors, and not only that there are less women with biographies on Wikipedia, and not even that these biographies are typically much less developed.
Wikipedia suffers from many of the same issues in representing the global population as the Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics community as a whole. For example, only ten to twenty percent of editors identify as female. Countering systemic bias towards over-representation of Northern Hemisphere white men will require active recruitment and engagement efforts towards under-represented groups. Supporting that recruitment will also require ensuring that the editing interface and culture do not disadvantage under-represented groups. The spatial distribution of Wikipedia articles is highly uneven at a global perspective. The average age as well as the average length of articles in Western and Central Europe deviates from articles in the rest of the world. This due to the dominance of content in the region is linked to both a strong overrepresentation of European languages and the often observed self-focus bias which states that people edit Wikipedia mainly with respect to their surroundings.
This uneven distribution of knowledge carries with it the danger of spatial solipsism for the people who live inside one of Wikipedia’s focal regions. English, Polish, German, Dutch, and French are the Wikipedia's with the largest numbers of geotagged articles. Since all these languages are spoken in Europe they may make a significant contribution to the platform. By contrast, other continents are much less represented in the world’s most prominent digital repository of human knowledge. As we pointed in the post about Africa on Wikipedia, the whole continent of Africa contains only about 2.6% of the world’s geotagged Wikipedia articles despite having 14% of the world’s population and 20% of the sword’s land.
In terms of content, Wikipedia is a reliable database. It is unreliable due to the lack of coverage on topics around the world. Wikipedia exists within a broad societal context of multiple overlapping communities, institutions and cultures. Although it is widely used, opinion of Wikipedia in academic circles has often been negative. The consideration of Wikipedia as a low-quality source of evidence discourages contributions and removes the positive reinforcement of recognition for this work. This problem is diminishing as content quality increases and consequently the reputation of Wikipedia improves. In terms of content, Wikipedia is a reliable database. It is unreliable due to the lack of coverage on topics around the world.
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