Anyone who visits Wikipedia currently will (or at least should) notice a very large banner ad at the top of the page that says “Please Read: A Personal Appeal from Wikipedia Founder Jimmy Wales.” This ad rotates with a few others asking for donations to the Wikimedia Foundation. The personal appeal from its founder can be found here. What bothers me most about this is that it states its goal is “imagine a world where every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge.” Here’s a few reasons why this bothers me so:
1. Is “the sum of all human knowledge” even accessible? There are many subjects (especially the more abstract ones) which don’t have nice, clear-cut answers that make the sum of all knowledge rather silly. In other words, these things are hotly debated and unless all viewpoints are explained, this project fails to realize “the sum of all human knowledge.”
2. Is Wikipedia this storehouse of information? Probably not. The best and wort part of a community like Wikipedia is that Joe the Plumber has as much credibility and influence on a Wikipedia article on Schroedinger’s Paradox as a theoretical physicist whose life’s work is on that exact subject. Secondly, since Wikipedia does not allow people to promote their own research/understanding, all information must be, by default, secondhand at best. Wikipedia is good in that it requires sources for “verification,” but looking at the topics which I am knowledgable, these sources aren’t even primary sources but already secondary sources with the opinions of the secondary authors. I could go on a rant here, but it is not vital to this article.
3. Who gets to determine which information is valid for a Wikipedia entry? In short, the Wikipedia community. I’m not a conspiracy theorist who believes the bulk of Wikipedia is moderated by a small group of zealots. However, I don’t expect the large majority of people to be experts on any given topic. In other words, the experts on any given topic are always in the minority, which means their expertise is counted equally with the majority’s lack of expertise.
4. Who doesn’t have free access to Wikipedia? I can think of two examples: those who lack internet access and those who are denied access to Wikipedia (either by governments or ISPs). Both of these categories are things that the Wikimedia Foundation does not list in its goals. What do they list? In short, their own sustainability (check out the about page in the annual report). Where does their money go? The majority of the $5.6M goes to paying for salaries, travel, business-related expenses, and real estate. In other words, they are an incarnation of “consumer-supported” products (such as PBS, public radio, etc). “Free access” in their case means keeping them in business; everyone must provide their own avenue to Wikipedia.
Wikipedia’s fundraising here isn’t so that every single person on the planet has access to the sum of all human knowledge. It is, instead, so that every single person on the planet–who has proer internet access–has access to a summary of information democratically chosen and edited primarily by average people with average understanding.
