Are Wikis To Be Trusted?

John Dowdell points to an interesting little discussion on the value of Wikis. It seems that there are members of the academic community, and net population at large, that consider sources such as Wikipedia, and Wiki in general, to be "shady" at best.

The original article takes note that there is no "formal editor" in place which leads to rampant errors and misinformation. The supporters of Wikipedia contest that the very nature of the Wiki means there are thousands upon thousands of editors all auto-correcting the content.

In the discussion that pursues, an interesting aspect of Wiki is raised, namely, "I could edit it, but it will be changed back to the wrong information because people don't like the truth". This is definitely a fascinating observation of the potential to steer the depiction of "facts and history" in a direction that best suits the authors. This harks back to something from one of my first philosophy classes -- "History must be considered from the point of view of the author."

Another good observation focused on the gradient of reliability that can be seen based on topic matter. One comment noted that programming and software architecture Wikis, far less subjective than say, politics, are generally spot on in terms of content. I imagine that this is also the case in enterprise uses of Wikis, though there is a great deal of politics at work in many of those environments so it's hard to tell from here.