Can you trust Wikipedia?The founder of the online encyclopedia written and edited by its users has admitted some of its entries are 'a horrific embarrassment'. What did our panel of experts think of the entries for their fields?
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The Guardian, Monday 24 October 2005 Article historyMike Barnes on the Steve Reich entry
Factually, the entry on the composer Steve Reich is sound. All the facts that I have cross-checked were correct, but some of the writing is unhelpful. Take the first line of the entry: "Reich is popularly regarded as repetitive and minimalist, but in some works deviates from a purely minimalist style, which shows some connection to Minimalism and the work of Reich's visual artist friends such as Sol Lewitt and Richard Serra."
Run that past me again! In cases like these, I wonder if Lewitt and Serra were indeed his friends, and cross- referencing the entries on those artists, there is no mention of Reich.
I don't know how much the Life And Work entry was limited by space, but it's unsatisfactory as an overview. The writer obviously knows what Reich is all about, but out of a total of eight often short paragraphs there is a long paragraph devoted to Four Organs, which seems strange given that it is singled out as "unique in the context of Reich's other pieces". But then this thumbnail sketch inexplicably misses out all the pieces Reich wrote between 1978 and 1993, which included some significant works.
These cavils aside, it's obvious that someone has taken care to make the entry factually accurate, even if the way it is written lacks clarity and doesn't necessarily inspire confidence. But with the Reich entry itself, and the links to other minimalist composers' entries and websites, one can access an impressive amount of information quickly.
Overall mark: 7/10
· Mike Barnes interviews Steve Reich in the current edition of Wire.
Alexandra Shulman on the Haute couture entry
Broadly speaking, it's inaccurate and unclear. It talks about haute couture and then lists a large number of ready-to-wear designers. As a very, very broad-sweep description there are a few correct facts included, but every value judgment it makes is wrong.
Overall mark: 0/10
· Alexandra Shulman is editor of Vogue
Mark Kurlansky on the Basque people entry
Three things bothered me about the entry.
1. It says: "Aquitanians spoke a language which is proven beyond doubt to be akin to Basque." I am not familiar with the Aquitaine language but would be very surprised if it bore any relation to Euskera, the Basque language.
2. It is not exactly right to claim, as Wikipedia does, that after 1975 Eta continued despite the end of Basque persecution. After the death of Franco the Spanish passed a constitution that Basque nationalists (a narrow majority of Basques) boycotted. The constitution has a number of problems. For the first time in Spanish history it made Castillian the official language of Spain. It also forbade any discussion of the break up of the Spanish state, so there cannot even be a referendum on the Basque future. More important, the Guardia Civil has remained as an occupying army. The Spanish arrest thousands of Basques every year. Most of them are beaten or tortured and then released. Newspapers and political parties are shut down. In one recent case a Basque-language paper was closed down because it was able to quote an Eta source in its reporting. Over the years, Eta has grown ever smaller. But there has been no comparable lessening of repression by the Spanish.
3. The entry talks of Navarra as though it is a non-Basque region where a lot of Basques happen to live. There are actually seven Basque provinces, each with its own dialect of Euskera and slightly varying traditions. Four of them are in Spain and Navarra is one of them. Northern Navarra is in fact one of the most traditional Basque places in terms of language, architecture, and culture.
Overall mark: 7/10
· Mark Kurlansky is author of The Basque History of the World
Anthony Julius on the TS Eliot entry
It's not terrible. But then I wouldn't have thought of using Wikipedia as a serious reference source.
No glaring inaccuracies jump out at me. It doesn't list my book in the bibliography, but there are plenty of other useful links. The Waste Land is highlighted and when I click on it, a separate entry for the book pops up. There's a Four Quartets bit, too, and all the plays. And when I click on the year 1922, I get a page telling me what else happened that year. Eliot is at the centre of a whole web of other references.
It's purely factual and not in any way analytical, but then that's all you want from this sort of thing.
Overall mark: 6/10
· Anthony Julius is author of TS Eliot, Anti-Semitism and Literary Form
Claire Tomalin on the Samuel Pepys entry
This provides a fairly substantial introduction to Pepys. However, there are a few small inaccuracies. It says that he married "Elisabeth St Michel", which should be "de St Michel", at St Margaret's, Wesminster in December 1655. In fact there was an earlier wedding on October 10, the anniversary they always celebrated. It was probably a religious ceremony, whereas the December one was a civil ceremony, the only kind legal under Cromwell.
The entry suggests Pepys's diary was started as a new year's resolution, but there is no evidence to support this. It also misspells Henry Wheatley, who was responsible for a good edition of the diary, as Wheatly.
More important are the omissions. It fails to say that Edward Montagu became the Earl of Sandwich. There is no mention of Pepys's Tangier diary. And it says, "he was variously MP for Castle Rising, Norfolk; for Sandwich; and for Harwich. Most of these constituencies had connections with his patron Edward Montagu." In fact, Pepys was elected for Sandwich but was contested and immediately withdrew, returning to Harwich. His patron was not Edward Montagu but the Duke of York. It should also really mention the stone Pepys suffered from throughout his childhood and youth, and which he had surgically removed in 1658, a brave and risky decision that changed his life, and without which there would have been no diary.
And it is poor on the diary itself. There is no appreciation of its literary merits. It ends with, "Reading it, one cannot help thinking how very much we must all be alike. His characteristic closing sentence was: 'And so to bed'." Which is hardly a worthy summary of the literary merits of one of our great literary works.
But sophisticated lit crit would be asking a lot of a small, free encyclopedia entry. There's a lot of good basic stuff in it, and I can't be rude about the bibliography because I'm in it!
Overall mark: 6/10
· Claire Tomalin is author of Pepys: The Unequalled Self
Derek Barker on the Bob Dylan entry
I can't find anything much wrong with it. I'm not very familiar with Wikipedia - I've never looked through the Dylan entry before. It's reasonably comprehensive but there are such a number of obsessive Dylan fans out there to make corrections that I can't see very much wrong. If you are just browsing and want to check something on Dylan then I guess the prose style doesn't matter. But Dylan fans tend to be quite literary, so some of the writing might piss people off.
Overall mark: 8/10
· Derek Barker is editor of the Dylan magazine Isis
Robert McHenry on the Encyclopedia entry
Reading the entry on "encyclopedia" leaves one with the impression that it was written by someone who had no previous knowledge of the subject and who, once he got into it, found it did not interest him very much. He browsed here and there in one or more reference works and noted what seemed important, but had no understanding of the cultural and historical contexts involved. In other words, it is a school essay, sketchy and poorly balanced.
The article is of modest length at 2,000 words (compare Britannica's corresponding article at about 26,000 words). The longest discussion of a particular work is of Thomas Browne's Pseudodoxia Epidemica, hardly an encyclopedia at all. The 120-odd words on Browne contrast oddly with the treatment given what was arguably the most influential encyclopedia in European history: "The French translation of [Chambers] was the inspiration of the Encyclopédie, perhaps the most famous early encyclopedia, edited by Jean le Rond d'Alembert and Denis Diderot and published from 175 [sic] to 1772 in 28 volumes, 71,818 articles, 2,885 illustrations." Was it famous for the number of its illustrations, one is left to wonder? (And by the way, the full first edition had 35 volumes.)
A cynic might conclude that the whole article exists chiefly as a context for this paragraph: "Traditional encyclopedias are written by a number of employed text writers, usually people with an academic degree. This is not the case with Wikipedia, a project started in 2001 with the goal to create a free encyclopedia. Anyone can add or improve text, images, and sounds ... By 2004 the project has managed to produce over a million articles in over 80 languages."
Overall mark: 5/10
· Robert McHenry was editor-in-chief of the Encyclopedia Britannica from 1992 to 1997
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