The Trouble with Wikipedia: A Cautionary Tale documents author John Rosenthal’s travails with an editor (censor) at Wikipedia who was determined to ensure that an entry followed the editor’s leftish-narrative standard of political correctness.

The story is interesting in itself, and it closes with some useful general lessons:

The larger moral of this story is that Wikipedia itself is a fundamentally flawed and unreliable source. In fact, it is wrong even to describe — much less to use — Wikipedia as a source. Wikipedia is merely a platform. Since anyone and everyone can edit Wikipedia entries and since they can do so anonymously, Wikipedia is, by its very nature, susceptible to constant manipulation. Indeed, even editors who choose to reveal their real identities remain for all intents and purposes anonymous. Readers will not, as a rule, search out the authorship of each and every edit, and they would not, as a rule, know who the authors are even if they did. As such, Wikipedia editors have no reputations, so they have no reputations to hurt.

At its best, Wikipedia would be essentially just a clearing house of citations of other sources and those sources would necessarily often be competing and discordant. The truth, as is its wont, would only emerge in the process of discussion and debate. But, as [this example] . . . demonstrates, interested parties can simply decide to “sit on” an entry and exclude citations that contain unwanted information. . . .

What is worse, the interested parties editing Wikipedia  might not only be individuals, but also institutions and even interested states or state agencies. If the latter possess the slightest bit of new media savvy, no one else will normally ever know. In 2008, for instance, it emerged that none other than the German foreign intelligence service, the BND, had been engaging in Wikipedia edits.

The caution is well-taken, and important, because Wikipedia is so frequently cited as the flagship example of the wonders of the free culture movement.

But the problems recounted in the article are only the tip of a large iceberg of concerns.  Rosenthal’s distinction between “platform” and “source” is a useful tool of illumination.  Wikipedia is indeed useful; I link to it often, as a way to quickly take a reader to background material. But I feel guilty as I do so, because the site is totally parasitic in that it demands that information be lifted from other, more reliable sources.

As far as web traffic goes, Wikipedia diverts the stream from those sources to itself, which cuts off most possible revenue-generating links for the original sources. So Wikipedia will prosper as long as the other sources are there to be lifted, and as long as it has an ideologically-committed base of volunteer workers (or a base of contributors who see personal advantage, just as Linux, the other great flagship of free culture, rests on the money supplied by IBM, HP, and other large companies).

As for new knowledge — the situation is reminiscent of the Dark Ages, when the inhabitants of Europe used the stone from the great buildings of the fallen Roman Empire as a handy quarry.

The bigger lesson is that free is not necessarily good because destroying productive capability is a long-term mistake. It creates a variation on the old saw “Give a man a fish . . . Teach a man to fish” in which you take a man who can fish and sink  his boat, and then feel good about yourself as you give him a sardine because you have eliminated nasty old self-interested markets from the system.