Wikipedia seeks consistency, without giving up on fun

DETROIT — There’s only one place on the Web where you can go for authoritative articles on subjects from Zimbabwe currency to Grosse Pointe’s connection to “The Simpsons.”

It’s Wikipedia.

And on Friday, hard-core volunteer writers and editors from all over the world, who assemble the online encyclopedia, will pour into Harvard’s law school for the first-ever U.S. convention to debate the finer points of “Wiki style” for entries on the Web site visited by millions each month.

Wikipedia is the place wired hipsters go for info. Completely peer-posted and edited by a dedicated force of thousands of readers-turned-editors, www.wikipedia.org has made the leap to being one of the premiere destinations on the Web and is on the verge of becoming its own verb, like Google.

The number of articles on the site has skyrocketed to more than 4.6 million worldwide (more than 1.2 million in English). And Wikipedia is so popular that virtually every general search on Google will net a Wikipedia entry somewhere in the top five results.

Michael Karazim, a 22-year-old graduate student from Spring Arbor, Mich., says he uses the site 10 hours a week. He’s contributed articles on Spring Arbor history and local roads and highways.

“I do enjoy using it, personally,” he said. “It makes it really easy to go from topic to topic.”

Part of Wiki’s allure — it’s become one of the 20 most-visited sites on the Web — is its quick summaries of everything from presidential biographies to television show plotlines.

But many who visit to check out a topic on the fly find themselves staying, drawn into the web of articles created by the words in each entry that link to other entries.

At lunch Monday, Karazim was reading a BBC news report on Zimbabwe and the dollar when he ran across a term he had never heard before, a “bearer check.”

“I immediately went to Wiki,” he said. That article said it was a check that is treated like cash — it’s payable to whoever happens to be in possession of the slip of paper it’s written on.

But the entry also explained why the country had bearer checks and how they were used, and links in the item led him to other discussions of the euro, the governmental situation in Zimbabwe, reserve currency and eventually the U.S. dollar.

It’s that serendipity that keeps people browsing Wiki long after they would have closed a paper encyclopedia.

Wikipedia has often been the source of controversy.

The reason it has reached its enormous size and popularity is because of the volunteer efforts of thousands of amateur and professional writers and editors who post, discuss and refine each entry.

But the fact that anyone can edit any article leads to inaccuracies, some of which are caught sooner than others.

The most controversial inaccuracy in Wikipedia so far was about a relatively obscure figure outside of journalism circles: former editor of the (Nashville) Tennessean newspaper John Seigenthaler Sr.

As a prank, an operations manager of a delivery service in town edited his biography to suggest that he was linked with the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy.

The hoax went unnoticed for four months, when it was drawn to Seigenthaler’s attention. He blasted the site in a column published in USA Today.

Wikipedians admit that the site does see a fair amount of changes — some well-meaning, some not — that result in articles containing inaccurate information or information with a point of view, a no-no in Wiki circles.

“Some of the pages get vandalized a lot,” said Larry Kestenbaum, clerk and registrar of deeds for Washtenaw County, Mich., and a frequent Wiki contributor. “Malcolm X. The Kennedy assassination. The East Lansing page.”

But despite edits motivated by everything from religious views to football rivalries, most pages are reasonably accurate, he said.