Mondo Times Media Poll Archive

This poll ran from March 20 to 25, 2007.

Mondo Stars Poll Results

"Wikipedia provides balanced and reliable information." True 288/56% False 226/44%

Votes: 514

Patricia Aufderheide, a professor in the School of Communication at American University in Washington, from her article "Is Wikipedia the New Town Hall?" in the March 12, 2007 issue of In These Times magazine. Aufderheide is a senior editor of the magazine, and her most recent book is The Daily Planet: A Critic on the Capitalist Culture Beat.

She wrote: "Wikipedia is surprisingly good proof that collaborative work by amateurs can provide balanced and reliable information, and even become a vigorous site of public debate and negotiation. Wikipedia is an open-source encyclopedia of whatever information people want to explain to other people. It's wide open to anyone, has more than three million articles in 125 languages…and only three employees, counting founder Jimmy Wales. Everyone else is a volunteer, donating money, time and energy — many of them briefly. They follow a few clear rules, including one that calls for a "neutral point of view" — not objectivity but a fair representation of different perspectives.

"A Wikipedia entry is a living and constantly changing organism, reflecting the current state of negotiations between people of vastly differing opinions on a subject. For instance, the entry on abortion reflects constant input, monitored and edited by others of differing views.

"How accurate is Wikipedia? That depends on the strength of the publics that gather around the topics that are covered. But what's shocking is how accurate it is. Science entries are more accurate than entries in history. Facts that stand alone do better than those for which the meaning changes dramatically in context. But the community of active contributors does a lot for accuracy.

Wikipedia and blog actions take some explaining. How can you get reliability out of a mass of unreliable actions? James Surowiecki, an economics writer at the New Yorker, gives it away in the title of his book, The Wisdom of Crowds. He analyzed the research literature on group decision-making and exposed the counter-intuitive fact that crowds can in fact be wise, under certain conditions. In fact, time and again when asked to solve a problem, groups of people who individually and without consultation pool their opinions — even when their expertise varies widely and includes real experts — seem regularly to come up with answers that are at least as good as that of the most accurate member of the group.

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