SEM, SEO, PPC Blog – News & Opinion – David Ogletree

David,

I agree with the main point of your statement – Wikipedia is a mess and shouldn’t be weighted so high. However, is that weight something Google specifically assigns to Wikipedia, or is it a result of Wikipedia being one of the best-linked sites on the web?

As far as to the correctness of the information in Wikipedia, every instructor of every class I have taken in University has specifically mentioned that Wikipedia is not a trusted source of information. Many have even gone so far as to indicate that Wikipedia is *not* accepted as a source for any research *at all*. I’ve heard the same from every other College or University student that I’ve talked to.

Any students (or others) that depend on it have to learn to take it with a grain of salt; personally, I wouldn’t assign the ‘trustworthyness’ of Wikipedia at more than 80%.

I think wikipedia is a great source of information. But just like any other source of information, it becomes problematic if it’s your ONLY source of information. When doing research, you need to balance your sources, otherwise you get nucular results.

Like any other resource on the web, wikipedia strives to do the best that it can. To ask Google to rate it lower somehow it to ask Google to lie to its users. If I understand correctly, Google uses specific algorithms to figure out the rank of a site, and if Wikipedia happens to be linked more often than other sites, so be it. It should be users and not web services that know how to do research. No one should have to babysit students and tell them not to use a single source for all their work. If they haven’t learned it by now, let them fail their classes.

“Google treats Wikipedia like it is a trusted source of information.”

No… unfortunately it is the *users* who treat Wikipedia like it is a trusted source of information. This is subtly mentioned by the reader above who indicates that Google would be lying if they altered Wikipedia’s page rank. I seem to see that this blogger misunderstands the workings of not only Wikipedia, but Google, too. The ‘web site marketing’ part of this site name makes it all clear, though… David is simply upset because his clients will never be more than #2, something he no doubt promises them more than.

I seem to remember that when I was growing up and writing papers, I had to find more than one source of information to support a claim. It also seems that if the professors who are failing these students have access to accurate information, then so do the students themselves.

Coincidentally, I have an old set of encyclopedias (from the late ’50s and early ’60s) that has an interesting entry under ‘tobacco’. After a brief description of the farming, distribution and use of tobacco and tobacco products, the article concludes by saying that ‘there is no evidence that tobacco use is harmful to those in good health.’ Anybody can buy^h^h^h subsidize an encyclopedia entry, apparently… and living 30 miles from Winston Salem, NC, I can promise – it happens.

The article tries to pin the blame on Wikipedia, but the problem it describes belongs to the internet itself. The real problem is that I can publish erroneous information, and you can access it. Wikipedia actually fixes the problem in that scenario by adding “and you can change it if it’s wrong or out of date or poorly spelled.” You can’t do that to my blog or my website, but you can do that to my Wikipedia entries. And if I’m persistent enough, I can edit your edits, and you can edit my edits to your edits, ad nauseum. Those edits to edits to edits, however, are all logged and ‘historied’ so that anyone visiting the page can see if the information is, at least, debatable.

So there’s a fundamental change underway, here, and Mr. Ogletree is obviously not ready for it. That’s understandable – my generation grew up having its information handed to it – interactive technology did not exist on the consumer level, but sounded vaguely like it would be pornographic. So, at one extreme, professors might just hand out “Fs” when they see ‘wikipedia.org’ in the citation, and at the other end of the spectrum, students might be carelessly ingesting words on a page, simply because they exist. I have to imagine that if a piece of data on Wikipedia is so erroneous as to earn the student a failing grade, the student was both careless and narrow in finding other sources of information. And if Wikipedia is the only source of information, what leg does the professor have to stand on?

So the philosophy is that those students who failed (by, no doubt, waiting until the internet was the only bookstore or library open) should update the offending Wikipedia pages with the correct information. I do, however, acknowledge that Wikipedia is quite incongruent with an institution that has people paying tens of thousands of dollars per year to be spoon-fed information – the university system would much rather have huge sums of money involved in anything ‘erudite’. Wikipedia is free in every sense of the word, and I’m afraid that some people just aren’t there yet. I suggest that, should the complainants pursue their whines, Mr. Wales refund them double their Wikipedia membership fees.

Mr. Ogletree, may I suggest that the internet is a ‘natural system’ and that from the short list of ‘trade based economy’ and ‘misinformation’, only one exists (for long) in natural systems. You will often see a mammal raise its fur to make itself look bigger when it is afraid, but you’ll never see one bargaining for its life with a predator by offering foraged berries. It may *seem* like it’s all about money, but any ‘web site marketing’ service is simply misinformation of a different flavor. The internet is a great leveler, and any efforts that you undertake to make someone’s page rank higher than it would naturally is much more dangerously deceptive than an erroneous Wikipedia entry.

Do one thing; an experiment if you will. Pick several articles at random on wikipedia and change one part of it, however minor. Record the time it takes until the misinformation is changed.

Wikipedia is great. Granted, people will vandalize it, but it’s not as big of a problem as teachers are making it out to be. If you’re too dumb to check the sources of the essay you’re reading (which is what Wikipedia is essentially; a collection of essays), then you don’t deserve a passing grade. Check the sources listed on the webpage, and if the information matches up, then the essay is credible. If the MLA doesn’t wanna count Wikipedia as a credible source, then that’s fine. No one’s forcing anyone else to use Wikipedia anyway. Use other sources! Wikipedia isn’t the only damn website on the internet! Regardless, the point is, if you’re not willing to fix the problem, then you’ve got no room to complain.

What I feel like saying is that for some months, Wikipedia has become a real annonyance for Google users.
Wikipedia results are generally at the top whatever you search and this dramatically decrease the usual relevancy of Google results that point to the very website you are looking for.
There should at least be an option to hide/remove/block/ban Wikipedia results from Google results.
For the moment, you can reach this goal by adding -wikipedia to your search keywords but a Firefox extension, for example, would even be better.

Thanks in advance to the programmers that would make it.

Ant

For its sentiment, I agree with your gripe. But the problem with your assertion about Wikipedia is that it implies there is better and more authoritative information source somewhere out on the Web, which search engines should be prioritizing.

While there might be better information, hardly anything is authorized. If you want to know information from authoritative sources your closest thing to a sure bet is to visit the websites of domains which are known to represent various authorities. But even then, if you are looking for views on the political scene of the United States, http://www.whitehouse.gov only gives you 51% of the story.

I believe what makes Wikipedia worth having at the top of search engine results is that unlike all of the (other) crap-laden sites out there that are controlled by a single crap-laying individual, Wikipedia provides the opportunity that what should be objective information has a chance to be something other than the individual opinion of a single person. I am sure if you investigate the political seen of the United States on Wikipedia you will get a more well rounded view of it than you will find on the certainly more authoritative http://www.whitehouse.gov.

If a student wants information as authoritative and exhaustive as the printed version of Encyclopaedia Britannica and be able to find it on the Web, he or she should purchase a subscription to Encyclopaedia Britannica Online. Perhaps this leads us to that time worn adage: You Get What You Pay For. Wikipedia is free. And for that matter, sans the advertising you are subjected to, so is Google.

jason

Hi David,

Great post, thanks for the details on this. I’ve been researching this topic for a while and just believe that someone needs to come up with a “non Wikipedia result” search engine. I mention this on my blog for goodtagbadtag.com here

Hi,
Thank you for sharing. I suggest that you should the complainants pursue their whines, Mr. Wales refund them double their Wikipedia membership fees.