Wikipedia, John Edwards, and Web 2.0
Wikipedia. It’s the fifth most popular Web 2.0 site (behind MySpace, eBay, Facebook, and YouTube). It’s the most popular site on the web for encyclopedia style references – created by users writing for free. And it has an entry on former democratic U.S. Senater John Edwards – who ran for president in 2004 and 2008 but was dwarfed by the rockstar status of Hillary and Barack.
Wikipedia entries are “owned” more or less by their creators, who usually update them regularly. I published an article recently at Suite101 on Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. I’d been meaning to write it for a while and I published the article late on the evening on August 3rd, the day Solzhenitsyn died. In researching the article I looked at Wikipedia’s entry on Solzhenitsyn. The author/owner of the entry had updated it already on the afternoon of August 3rd to show that Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was dead. He had been dead about 12 hours at that time.
So it was surprising to many people that over the last week or so of July the John Edwards Wikipedia entry didn’t include a mention of recent accusations against the senator. The National Enquirer published a report that Edwards had fathered a child with a woman other than his wife – film producer Rielle Hunter.
The blog Wired published a story about the workings of Wikipedia on the issue. Wikipedia is struggling with the ethical implications of its own popularity. If too many people start to read your stuff you have to developed standards and ethics and try and behave professionally. On the morning of July 30th no mention of the allegations against Edwards had made it into the entry. Wikipedia editors had locked the entry while writers and editors debated what to say. The Wired piece was published after Wikipedia took a vote among the writers and edits and added a statement to the entry.
Yesterday, the Wikipedia entry says this:
July 2008, several news media outlets speculated that Edwards’ chances for the vice presidency may have been harmed by allegations published in supermarket tabloid The National Enquirer that he had fathered a child outside his marriage and had recently visited the child’s mother at the Beverly Hilton Hotel in Beverly Hills, California. Edwards stated “I’ve responded, consistently, to these tabloid allegations by saying I don’t respond to these lies and you know that,” and subsequently has not commented on the matter.
The 37,000 words of debate that took place at Wikipedia pulled the curtain back on some of the mystery the general public feels about the encyclopedia.
Hot Air published a report on Wednesday suggesting the pictures published by the National Enquirer were doctored. But today Edwards admitted the affair, though he denies paternity of the child.
Today, 18 hours after I looked at the blockquote above, the Wikipedia entry on Edwards has replaced that quote with a two-paragraph, 168-word section entitled “Extralmarital Affair.” And that section includes a link to a separate 2,300-word Wikipedia article on the affair. That’s Web 2.0.
The entire episode is an interesting lesson for high school and middle school students on how to evaluate the contents of the Web.
