One of the effects of Google's PageRank system is that, today, all search engines love Wikipedia: it's a link magnet. This means Wikipedia entries often get much higher rankings than original sources, even when they are right and Wikipedia is wrong, whether that's because of a typing mistake or vandalism.
Tim Bray has suggested one solution, which is for authoritative sources to make information easier to find. In Wikipedia: Resistance is Absent, he shows how much easier it is to find the population of Canadian provinces from Wikipedia than it is from Statistics Canada or government sites. What are your chances of finding, for example, http://www.gov.on.ca/ont/portal/!ut/p/.cmd/cs/.ce/7_ 0_A/.s/7_0_252/_s.7_0_A/7_0_252/_l/en?docid=EC001035?
Byron Saltysiak responded with a different idea: Using the Wikipedia machine.
The public sector shouldn't try to resist Wikipedia because it's futile; they shouldn't resist because embracing would be much more productive. Instead of wasting time try to fight back with standards and other methods to out compete Wikipedia, groups could just spend their time ensuring that the data is complete and correct in Wikipedia. In a fraction of the time they could fix the data, setup alerts on content changes, and get free hosting to boot.
That sounds like a good idea, and the Government of Ontario might do a pretty good job of keeping the Wikipedia pages about Ontario accurate and up to date. The state of California might also do a good job, but how would the pages change following, say, policy changes or election turnovers?
Would you like the Chinese government to keep a similar tight watch on its pages, and also correct entries for Falun Gong or whatever? (Perhaps it already does.)
This is, of course, why it's frowned on for people to edit Wikipedia entries about them, even if they are plainly wrong. But it doesn't stop a lot of people doing it -- including Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales.
But there is a third way. You can republish material from Wikipedia, so all Ontario, China, and Danah Boyd have to do is put a Wikipedia button on their home page that takes users to their (corrected) local copy of the Wikipedia page, rather than the one at Wikipedia. Doesn't matter if the original Wikipedia entry was rapidly reverted: you can say it was a correct copy at the time it was posted.
Now you've got a sort of "distributed Wikipedia" that will boost Wikipedia's page rankings even higher, of course. But with luck, many or most users won't go to the original, and even if they do, they probably won't check your version against the latest edits.
I'm not being entirely serious, but there is a serious point, which is that Wikipedia is a castle built on sand. There is no view without a point of view, even though Wikipedia is based on the idealistic pretence that there is.
Wikipedia deliberately removes the elements of reputation and responsibility on which most authority depends (written by named author who has a Nobel in physics; published in name brand encyclopaedia, and so on), but it's still the view of a small subsection of the planet's population -- mostly, I'd guess, white, middle-class Americans with computer access and, ultimately, Jimmy Wales.
This isn't a problem if Wikipedia is viewed correctly as the first step in any research. On that basis, it's fantastic. But if it's viewed as the last word, we're in real trouble.
