Martin Kearns and I discussed Clay Shirky’s ideas about how millions of individuals accurately post about an event much faster than reporters can publish their stories. Mr. Shirky used the London bombings to illustrate that Wikipedia posts information faster than the mainstream media. I decided to test this theory during Super Bowl XLIII. While watching the game, I tracked the progress of the game on Wikipedia.org, espn.com and the New York Times online.

     ESPN airs most games live on their website. There is a minor time delay however for the purpose of this experiment I decided to only compare posted content. The ESPN posted articles and updates throughout the game but they were not instantaneous. The posts were more commentary and highlights from earlier in the game, than a play by play recap.

    The New York Times online also had a story about the Super Bowl on their homepage. At one point this article was about 8 minutes behind the game. That was the shortest lag that I saw. This occurred in the middle of the fourth quarter. There wasn’t another post until the end of the game.

     In comparison, Wikipedia was never more than several seconds behind the game. As Al Micheals and John Madden waivered about whether the play on the field was a forced fumble or an incompletion, the Wikipedia page actually reflected these changes. The webpage was updated almost instantaneously. The posts were purely factual and contained no commentary about the game.

     A common assumption about Wikipedia is that its content not always trustworthy or accurate. Any errors on this page were corrected in the amount of time it takes to refresh your browser. These errors ranged from details regarding the game, like the correct call turnover mentioned above to typos. The word “that” was repeated on accident. I refreshed the page to see how quickly the content was being posted and by the time the page was reloaded the extra “that” was already deleted.

      I am not sure who these people are that update Wiki pages are -- I for one have never made a post.  But the people that do post take their job very seriously. If you are looking for up to the minute, factual information, Wikipedia should be one of the first websites you visit. And the next time a big story breaks, take the same kind of challenge that I did for the Super Bowl to see if Wikipedia updates are more frequent than mainstream media sites.  Post back here with a comment to share what you learned.
 

--Michelle Kohn