by Janette Treanor, April 26 2010.
Since the early days of the internet and the world wide web, people have crowded to online communication channels, from email down the social media timeline through Usenet, IRC, Wikipedia, Friendster, My Space, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter … to the mobile communication technologies of today (idfive, 2006). Since its beginning in 2001 multitudes of people from all over the globe have swarmed to be part of the Wikipedia phenomenon, to experience the satisfaction of participating in something for the benefit everyone and to experience the gratification of seeing their contribution published instantly online. The popularity of Wikipedia has never been questioned. Initially Wikipedia’s content was compared favourably by some to that of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (Giles, 2005), but murmurs currently circulating in the press and growing louder, are predicting Wikipedia, at least as it presents today, may be approaching the end of its lifecycle (Angwin & Fowler, 2009; Farrer, 2009; Frommer, 2009; Johnson, 2009; Subhasis, 2009). This paper argues that the quality of Wikipedia’s content has deteriorated over time and questions the authority, accuracy, reliability and completeness of Wikipedia content which is increasingly subjected to hoaxes, vandalism, political and corporate cleansing, self-promotion, and the abuse of power and the individual agendas of the site’s editors and administrators. The conclusions drawn counsel that Wikipedia should not be relied upon as a quality resource and warn that citing Wikipedia for serious academic scholarship is ill-advised.
