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The Wild World Of Wiki Politics
by Michael Martinez
The political universe is fast discovering the pitfalls of one of the Internet's most rapidly evolving information resources: Wikipedia, a collaborative online encyclopedia that anyone can edit.
The site currently boasts more than 3 million articles in 125 different languages and is now often the first page listed in basic search queries.
Wikipedia already has been the backdrop of a handful of political incidents during its short time on the Web. And all the while, its credibility as a source of accurate information has been the subject of fierce debate among scholars.
Peddling Political Wiki 'Sleaze'
The Wikipedia biographies of federal lawmakers were being altered at such a high rate by computers in Capitol Hill offices this past year that the site was forced in stretches to block contributions submitted from congressional Internet addresses. A Jan. 27 article in The Lowell Sun claimed that more than 1,000 changes to Wikipedia entries had been tracked to congressional offices during a six-month period in late 2005 and early 2006.
The revisions have run the gamut from one claiming that Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., is 180 years old to another made to the biography of Rep. Eric Cantor, R-Va., that said he "smells of cow dung." An aide to Rep. Martin Meehan, D-Mass., admitted this past January to authorizing an intern to delete Wikipedia references to broken campaign promises.
The site was the subject of controversy this spring in Georgia's gubernatorial race, when the campaign manager of Secretary of State Cathy Cox altered the biography of Lt. Gov. Mark Taylor, one of her primary opponents. The change included information about Taylor's son being charged for drunken driving in a fatal car accident. Cox fired the culprit, Morton Brilliant, and apologized to Taylor.
Taylor's staff tracked the changes to his Wikipedia entry to an Internet address registered to Brilliant. The same address also was linked to changes made to the biographies of state officials in Washington and South Carolina against whom Brilliant had campaigned in the past. On Taylor's Web log, campaign manager Mike Mikus said he hoped the incident did not indicate a surge of "peddling sleaze" in Georgia politics.
"The very simple and disgusting part of the whole thing is the act of exploiting a child for political purposes. ... What's so shocking about the entire situation is that this comes from a campaign whose main message is to change the tone of politics," he said.
Debating Wikipedia's Accuracy
Wikipedia's reputation was enhanced late last year when an article in the science journal Nature vouched for the site's accuracy -- at least for that of its scientific entries.
A comparison of the scientific information in Encyclopaedia Britannica and in Wikipedia claimed that Britannica's was only slightly more accurate. After examining 42 entries in each resource, Nature found that Britannica's contained an average of three errors while Wikipedia's contained an average of four.
Britannica refuted Nature's article this past March, issuing a 20-page paper on flaws it claimed to have found in the journal's research. According to Britannica, dozens of its entries that were cited by Nature as inaccurate were factually correct. Furthermore, Britannica contended that several of the articles cited in the study were not even in its encyclopedia.
"Almost everything about the journal's investigation, from the criteria for identifying inaccuracies to the discrepancy between the article text and its headline, was wrong and misleading," Britannica said.
But some experts believe that Wikipedia's peer-review editing process will help the site eliminate inaccurate entries soon after they are posted.
In an e-mail interview, Steven Jones, a communications professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, said Wikipedia entries that include empirically verifiable information are likely to be highly accurate. The best way for Wikipedia to ensure the accuracy of many contentious entries is to continue to keep the site accessible to a community of users who can review them, he said.
"From a practical standpoint, there is not much Wikipedia itself -- that is, the individuals responsible for the site proper, rather than users -- can do in terms of somehow policing or reviewing entries," Jones said. "On the other hand, what it can do, and has done, is to encourage use, by which means the collective knowledge of users will be put to the task of ongoing review."
The New Wiki On The Block
That belief may be behind an experiment launched last month by the new Sunlight Foundation. Its new wiki is called Congresspedia. The site, a collaboration of the foundation and the Center for Media and Democracy, is dedicated to information about Congress.
The project could invite attempts at political chicanery, but it actually aims to solve some of the problems surrounding the wiki model by bringing more transparency to the process. The site is edited by a full-time professional, and its contributors must register to edit entries.
Conor Kenny, the site's editor, said another part of the strategy is to focus on the official acts of lawmakers. He said large portions of the content used for the site's launch were imported from Wikipedia, but the entries were edited to better suit the purposes of Congresspedia. No incidents of abuse on the site have been reported thus far, he said.
According to Kenny, Congresspedia also will give contributors an opportunity to reshape news from traditional print and broadcast sources they might consider to be biased. "It's an interesting kind of new manifestation of the whole debate about media bias in terms of what is included and left out of articles," Kenny said.
As editor, Kenny maintains a Web log to document where contributors have been posting the most material and to showcase their work. Another feature of the site links to television interviews of lawmakers on "The Daily Show" and "The Colbert Report," two popular politically oriented shows on Comedy Central.
"We have no problem with Congresspedia reflecting the satire of politics," he said.
Jones said wiki sites with interactive features are more likely to play a role in upcoming elections than those that only aggregate information. Even though the recent biography-doctoring scandals generated buzz, Jones said sites that allow individuals to meet in online forums and exchange information and opinions are more likely to have an effect on the political process.
"I think we may see social-networking sites like MySpace play a role in 2006, and possibly 2008, as they might be used to bring together voting blocs," he said.
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