Wikipedia has caught my attention lately. First, in the article I blogged about yesterday in the October HBR, Scott Cook from Intuit is talking about using volunteers to help for-profit companies build their businesses. He argues that there is resistance to this because of some myths people have about giving up control to "the masses." One such myth is that what you get will be "unreliable and error-ridden because the contributions come from amateurs."

In response, he cites a study by Nature magazine that compared entries in Wikipedia to those in the online Encyclopedia Britannica. According to the study:

In the end, the journal found just eight serious errors, such as
general misunderstandings of vital concepts, in the articles. Of those,
four came from each site. They did, however, discover a series of
factual errors, omissions or misleading statements. All told, Wikipedia
had 162 such problems, while Britannica had 123.

That averages out to 2.92 mistakes per article for Britannica and 3.86 for Wikipedia.

Yes Brittanica is in the lead, but neither side is perfect. Just because you get a bunch of experts doesn't mean the information is perfect. And personally, I'd rather have the group that has MORE people reviewing it than the one who leaves it only to the experts.

It's funny. I think we put a lot of stock in myths like this. It's like the long tail concept. We grew up believing that the records we saw in the store and the books we saw on the shelf were the ONLY good ones, or at least better than the rest. If you didn't get your book published, it's because it wasn't good enough. With the internet and the long tail, we now see that there was PLENTY of good content out there, just not enough shelf space. Being good and being a best seller were not synonymous.

That shows up in Wikipedia too. I saw a Facebook comment exchange lately about the fact that Wikipedia has an entry on "More Cowbell," making reference to the (really funny) skit on Saturday Night Live. One comment pointed out that Wikipedia places the same importance on "More Cowbell" as it does "Nuclear Physics" because it has entries on each.

No! In the old days, when you had to limit yourself to 23 volumes, you couldn't include entries on everything. If you wanted to include something on More Cowbell, you'd have to cut something else to make it fit. That's not true any more! I don't have to flip through all the N entries before I get to Nuclear Physics. If I want Nuclear Physics, Google delivers it to me. If I want More Cowbell, Google delivers it to me. More Cowbell is not more important. It's just there.

Our old mental models impact so deeply what we see. We need to force ourselves to be aware of that.