Science & tech activity on Wikipedia visualised - courtesy of abeautifulwww.com

Bad press on Wikipedia is probably something that most of us don’t fear too much. If you’re someone who does have such concerns, then you might want to set up an alert on Wiki Alarm. This service will alert you about changes to any wiki page that you are concerned about. It’s the latest thing in Online Reputation Management.

The guys behind the product have even found a term to describe the ultimate wiki disaster: Wiki-circularity. This is where a fiction is posted on Wikipedia and this is then taken at face value by a blogger or journalist who writes about it. This article/post gets quoted as a source on wikipedia and your fate – or reputation – is apparently sealed.

There are quite a few examples of nonsense on Wikipedia surviving on the site for a long time, and sometimes even finding their way into the press. The Guardian even used fabricated quotations apparently from Maurice Jarre, a French composer and conductor, in his obituary in April this year. It’s probably no coincidence that this snappy new term was coined by someone in that most dubious of disciplines, marketing. ‘Wiki-circularity’ is one way of putting it, but bad journalism, or even defamation, would be more accurate. Checking sources is basic.

It’s probably best to treat Wikipedia as a brief, tentative overview with (hopefully) some useful leads to follow up. The sources are all important in Wikipedia. Most journalists worth their salt seem to head to the sources anyway according to a study by the American Journalism Review last year.

If you want to know more about making the most of Wikipedia, there are some useful resources available. Many of them are found under the reference section of the site. Last year, the computer book publishing company O’Reilly, published a How To Wiki guide as a part of their Missing Manuals imprint. They’ve also very kindly put the book on the Wikipedia help pages – Wikipedia the Missing Manual. It’s a fairly comprehensive overview of how to use the encyclopaedia. Another practical guide called How Wikipedia Works can also be read online, although not in wiki (editable) form.

There are a few other interesting books for the general reader (rather than dry academic tomes, of which there are a few too) about the ideas behind Wikipedia. In 2006 Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams wrote Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changed Everything which explained just how it made a difference. In March of this year, Professor of Journalism Andrew Lih’s book The Wikipedia Revolution: How a Bunch of Nobodies Created the World’s Greatest Encyclopedia gave a history of the project. Finally, a couple of months ago Andrew Dalby, a writer on language and food history, has published The World and Wikipedia: How We are Editing Reality which looks at how the articles relate to the reality they pretend to reflect.

Wikipedia’s useful and potentially misleading qualities must be fairly obvious, however the number of editors seems to be falling. Dalby and Lih raise a few other issues that seem to be slowing work on the project: it’s possible that almost all of the most important articles have already been written, and the proliferation of rules might be putting people off contributing. In one of Dalby’s earlier books, he looked at the hegemony of the English language and in his Wikipedia book he examines whether its popularity is killing off rival publications, especially outside the Anglophone world. Others complain how Wikipedia monopolises Google results (although it seems staff at Encyclopaedia Britannica are key amongst these critics).

If you don’t like the Wiki-monopoly you can always start contributing to Citizendium, the encyclopaedia started by Larry Sanger who founded Wikipedia along with Jimmy Wales. Sanger became disillusioned with Wikipedia’s methods for achieving reliability, and his alternative wiki encyclopaedia gives a more prominent role to experts. (You could also consider Conservativepedia who give a more prominent role to bong-smoking US conservatives of the Dubya mould.)

Alternatively you could follow these five simple steps for contributing to Wikipedia:

1. Attribute/ source everything if you’re writing, and treat everything not attributed with caution if you’re reading

2. Have an argument for notability at the back of your mind (deletionists wield this criteria as their chief weapon to cut out articles)

3. Have a look at the featured articles and very good articles to get an idea of the direction you should be heading

4. Remember you don’t own anything on Wikipedia. It’s not your article, but merely one you started or contributed to

5. If you want to upload images familiarise yourself with the Wikipedia images policy and especially the image use policy