海角大神

Visit the Wikipedia entry for Apollo 11, and you鈥檒l read about how NASA landed two men on the moon. Visit the Wikipedia entry for the Rothschild family, and you鈥檒l see nothing about shapeshifting lizard people. Go to the entry on the Earth, and you鈥檒l learn that the planet is basically spherical.

No political rants. No conspiracy theories presented as fact. It鈥檚 almost like not being on the internet.

As the information age has shaped up to be the misinformation age, with multi-billion-dollar Silicon Valley giants struggling to deal with hatemongers, propagandists, and all manner of crackpots, Wikipedia, the world鈥檚 fifth-most-visited website, has seen its credibility grow. By hewing close to a set of core principles, the free, collaborative encyclopedia recalls the optimism of the web鈥檚 early days, before the like buttons, clickbait headlines, and political bots began to strain the relationship between technology and the truth.

鈥淲ikipedia now is one of the lone survivors of that original Web 1.0 type of world,鈥� says Joseph Reagle, an associate professor at Northeastern University and author of 鈥淕ood Faith Collaboration: The Culture of Wikipedia.鈥�

To be sure, it鈥檚 not hard to find an error on Wikipedia, especially if you include errors of omission. Groups marginalized in real life, such as women and ethnic minorities, are likely to be marginalized on Wikipedia. But those same groups are less likely to face the kind of overt聽vilification seen on Facebook, YouTube, or Reddit.

To find the kind of rancor common to these sites on Wikipedia, one has to peel back the site鈥檚 outer layer 鈥� the neutral and authoritative entries on nearly every subject 鈥� and visit each entry鈥檚 鈥渢alk鈥澛爌age.聽There, you can see the back-and-forth that goes into each article.

Sometimes these exchanges can get contentious, on topics ranging from the monumental to the mundane. In the event of an 鈥渆dit war,鈥� where dueling editors continually overwrite each other鈥檚 work, the site鈥檚 volunteer administrators can step in and restrict how a page is updated and by whom.

That鈥檚 what happened beginning in 2005 for the entry for 鈥淗ummus,鈥� which became a proxy battleground for the Arab-Israeli conflict, with each side claiming to have invented the mashed聽garbanzo bean聽dip. Admins intervened, and today, any would-be 鈥淗ummus鈥澛燾ontributor must have made at least 500 edits to other Wikipedia entries and have had an account for at least 30 days. As of this writing, the dish is described as 鈥淟evantine鈥� in origin.

But even on the talk pages, a sense of shared purpose generally prevails, with adversaries on all sides agreeing, for the most part, that the goal is to create a high-quality encyclopedia entry.

鈥淚ndeed the purpose of Wikipedia, to create a free encyclopedia that anyone can edit,鈥� says Professor Reagle, 鈥渢hat singularity of focus is the thing that holds Wikipedia in good stead in light of all of the propaganda and misinformation that we see now.鈥�

According to Wikipedia鈥檚 entry for itself, the site was founded by tech entrepreneur Jimmy Wales and philosopher Larry Sanger in 2001, as a way of quickly expanding the number of entries on their Nupedia project, a more traditional online encyclopedia written by experts. Wikipedia鈥檚 initial aim was to turn a profit, but it transitioned to a non-profit model in 2003. Unless you count the year-end fundraising appeals, Wikipedia runs no ads.

鈥淚f you are in the business of making money out of people鈥檚 attention, fake news would be so helpful for your business,鈥� says Mostafa Mesgari, an assistant professor of management information systems at Elon University in Elon, N.C. 鈥淲ikipedia is very different from social media.鈥�

Today, Wikipedia 鈥� a collection of about 300 encyclopedias in various languages 鈥� is maintained by a community of about 200,000 volunteers, and is operated by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation, which also runs sister sites Wiktionary, Wikiquote, Wikisource, Wikimedia Commons, and other sites that offer free content produced and curated by volunteers.

Early on, the site was derided for its open-access approach. A 2006 piece in The New Yorker described it as 鈥渁 system that does not favor the Ph.D. over the well-read fifteen-year-old.鈥� In 2007, a New Jersey middle-school librarian made headlines around the country when she posted signs that read 鈥淛ust say no to Wikipedia.鈥� That same year, then Sen. Ted Stevens (R) of Alaska proposed banning the site in public schools.

鈥淲ikipedia inevitably will be overtaken by the gamers and the marketers to the point where it will lose all credibility,鈥� wrote law professor Eric Goldman in a 2005 blog post titled 鈥淲ikipedia Will Fail Within 5 Years.鈥�

Instead, it seems the opposite happened. Studies on Wikipedia鈥檚 reliability began comparing the site favorably with the centuries-old Encyclop忙dia Britannica. More and more professors began suggesting to their students that the site can be a good starting point for further research. As Professor Mesgari and his colleagues noted in 2014, the preponderance of studies comparing Wikipedia with professionally produced encyclopedic information find that Wikipedia is a 鈥済enerally reliable source of information.鈥�

鈥淚 don鈥檛 think any of their predictions and ruminations came true about Wikipedia,鈥� says Reagle of the site鈥檚 critics. 鈥淏ut I think some of the concerns did apply more widely.鈥�

Wikipedia credits its resiliency against misinformation to its three core content policies: a neutral point of view, verifiability, and no original research. 鈥淎nybody using the encyclopedia can check that information comes from a reliable source,鈥� says Kui Kinyanjui, a spokeswoman for the Wikimedia Foundation. 鈥淲e don鈥檛 publish original research. What we cover is what is out there and what has been reliably cited by knowledgeable sources.鈥�

This epistemic conservatism often leads Wikipedia to reproduce the biases that exist in the larger culture. For instance, up until she won the Nobel Prize in Physics on Tuesday, University of Waterloo physicist Donna Strickland lacked her own Wikipedia entry, an oversight that Ms. Kinyanjui chalks up to an absence of media coverage about her.

鈥淲e consider ourselves a mirror of the world,鈥� she says. 鈥淎nd that means that we are a mirror of some of the shortfalls of the world.鈥�

Sometimes the demographics of Wikipedia鈥檚 community 鈥� which is overwhelmingly male and more than a little nerdy 鈥� can distort that mirror. For instance, just 17 percent of the biographies in the English-language Wikipedia are of women. And the entry for the Xhosa language, which is spoken by nearly 20 million people, is shorter than the entry for the fictional Klingon language. 鈥淚t鈥檚 not a completely rosy picture when it comes to the content we have,鈥� says Kinyanjui. 鈥淏ut it is a work in progress.鈥�

Despite its gaps, Wikipedia remains a far better launching point for research than most other sites hosting user-generated content. (If you doubt this, just imagine a high-school student researching, say, chemtrails, and whether she would be better served by starting off with Wikipedia or with YouTube.)

YouTube recognized this particular shortcoming earlier this year, and now it posts links to Wikipedia or Brittanica at the top of search results for particularly charged search terms, such as 鈥淗olocaust鈥� or 鈥渃limate change.鈥� The move marks something of a concession by Google, the company that owns YouTube, which acknowledged that even a company worth nearly a trillion dollars can鈥檛 outperform a nonprofit that relies on volunteers committed to getting the facts right.

鈥淚t鈥檚 the best sum of all human knowledge,鈥� says Mesgari.