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Can Wikipedia Ever Make the Grade?
swestcott writes to mention an article at the Chronicle of Higher Education site, wondering if Wikipedia will ever 'make the grade'? Academics are split, and feuding, about how to handle the popular collaborative project. Due to the ease of editing correct information into nonsense, many professors are ignoring it. Others want to start contributing. From the article: "As the encyclopedia's popularity continues to grow, some professors are calling on scholars to contribute articles to Wikipedia, or at least to hone less-than-inspiring entries in the site's vast and growing collection. Those scholars' take is simple: If you can't beat the Wikipedians, join 'em. Proponents of that strategy showed up in force at Wikimania, the annual meeting for Wikipedia contributors, a three-day event held in August at Harvard University. Leaders of Wikipedia said there that they had turned their attention to increasing the accuracy of information on the Web site, announcing several policies intended to prevent editorial vandalism and to improve or erase Wikipedia's least-trusted entries."
Answer: yes. And in the few days since the last Wikipedia-related Slashdot article, not much has changed. It feels like a dupe over and over again, but its actually different articles each time. Yet they all say the same thing.
Here's an idea to make Wikipedia more reliable: show the time of the last edit for pages, or even better, for sections of pages.
Wikipedia pages are constantly viewed by people. If thousands of people see a wikipedia page and don't change it for a month, I would be inclined to trust the information presented in the page. However, if the page was edited in the last 24 hours, I might be more skeptical. Longer or shorter times would lead to more trust or skepticism.
A lot of people claim that you can't trust the masses, which I don't really believe. Why should we trust a couple experts on a subject over those same two experts along with a few thousand people, when they are trying to determine whether or not information is true? There are plenty of "experts" who look at / edit wikipedia pages. I have trouble understanding why people have such a hard time trusting wikipedia but trust other sources of news. I'm not saying that anyone should trust wikipedia articles, just that I don't think there is sufficient evidence to show that wikipedia articles are any more or less trustworthy than other sources of information. Take anything you read with a grain of salt.
With all that said, bringing some form of timestamps to wikipedia would, in my opinion, make it more trustworthy.
There's quite a lot of academics adding information to the Wikipedia already. It's no stranger than writing a magazine article, or appearing on any kind of radio or TV show, or writing part of a primary school textbook - or writing an article in a paper encyclopedia for that matter. Reaching out to a wider audience is part and parcel of the job today, and just because you won't get a citation or a CV bullet point out of it doesn't mean it's completely worthless to you.
No, Wikipedia is not an authoritative reference, but then, neither is EB.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
Sure, you can edit a page into nonsense, but most pages are closely watched so such vandalism will be undone in short order.
It seems to me that the only people who don't take wikipedia seriously are those who feel threatened by it. Employees of traditional encyclopedias and M$ shills who want to keep selling Encarta, and so on.
Or tenacity, depending on how you want to look at it. I've a friend who is listed on Wikipedia since he has done work the public is aware of. He found his page and made some updates. Nothing self propping or anything, just some background information. It was reverted by someone who claimed it was inaccurate and lacked a source. Well ok, he didn't cite a source, but then he doesn't need to he's the primary. He decided the hell with it and left it alone.
No big deal, of course, it's just a page about some random DJ, but it's a demonstration of how the "Well someone will fix it" mentality isn't always a good thing. Regardless of how right you think you are, you may not be. However if the misinformed person is tenatious, and if others agree with them, that can become the "accepted truth" as far as Wikipedia is concerned.
Wikipedia = Crappiest Search, Anywhere
Seriously, it's 2006, and you're still doing case-sensitive searches?
As a purely constructive Wikipedia contributor, I have a feeling (from my gut, of course, not my head) that there will never in the future be a moment, even a millisecond, when there is absolutely no vandalism present on WP. However, Wikipedia is far more comprehensive, I believe, than any other encyclopedia operating by academic submissions will ever be.
There is far more specific knowledge. Just see this page. Awesome stuff; I would never expect to see anything like that in a regular general encyclopedia. I believe that, given that everything else in the world has an (at most) linear rate of change (in terms of fossil fuels, engineering, knowledge, celebrity divorces), Wikipedia will continue to exist well. Of course, someone could take over Wikipedia and use it for unscrupulous objectives, just like RSA encryption has allowed criminals to flourish. We'll never know, of course, since Douglas Adams died before he wrote that 6th book.
But don't panic. Yet.
Professors are not the ones who will decide whether Wikipedia will make the grade or not. The populus will. And the populus has already decided. I know a number of people who now go to Wikipedia first, Google second.
Simpy
Wikipedia is OK for most people on most subjects. However when you want information on a specialized topic it is better to find other sources. For example when I need to look up something about philosophy I go to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy whose articles are contributed by people with PhDs about their area of expertise. It also has copious references on each topic. Such a source will always be better than wikipedia, at least if you need the most accurate information.
Philosophy.
Wikipedia can never be used in research work with an authoritative citation, since it is constantly changing. If I use a wikipedia article in a research paper's footnotes or bibliography, the article is likely to change before anyone goes back to check the references. Sure you could go back through the history file and try to reconstruct the article as it existed when the citation was taken, but that just adds a whole new level of difficulty to citations, now the author must cite the date and exact time when the research was taken. And then, the changes to the article before and after that time, are they more or less accurate than the citation? Furthermore, wikipedia articles are full of "citation needed" footnotes, and may also contain huge sections of plagiarized text. Sources are hugely problematic, it can be impossible to trace a basic fact back to its source from a wikipedia article.
Scholarship is a system where we build on the work of others, if the chain is broken, there can be no progress. If scholars cannot work with authoritative citations, their work may not just be useless, it may be damaging. Look at some of the recent scandals over scientists who faked research, they got away with it because nobody could check their sources, and millions of dollars of research funding were wasted following up on the faked research. Wikipedia is just going to make this problem worse. I hope that scientists with PhDs know better than to use wikipedia for research, but then, your average 7 year old kid in elementary school might end up as a PhD or M.D. one day, do your really want the surgeon who might operate on YOU someday, to have learned his basic science from possibly-vandalized articles in wikipedia?
Wikipedia, to me, is meant for the casual person who wants a centralized, fairly reliable source of information about the world. In this Wikipedia succeeds magnificently. I am willing to bet that most wikipedia queries are from people who are looking for overview primer materials. Even academics can use it for these purposes profitably.
However, academics should go past wikipedia in their research simply because it is usually better to read actual research articles published in the scientific journals which they have access to. Academics need more than an overview, they need the meat, bones, and fat of the subject.
For those who say that this well and good for scientists, but offers little to the debate concerning non-science academic use of Wikipedia. Well my answer may be less satisfying than some. But it goes something like this: If its not science then it shouldn't be considered academic.
Lastly, I think the use of encyclopedias in academics is generally an issue of laziness and an unwillingness to do serious research into the subject.
A Good Troll is better than a Bad Human.
I think this point is often underrated. Often I'll want to look up some term, or a person, or whatever, not because I need a detailed and accurate reference, but just because I happened to be reading something and saw mention of X and suddenly thought "Hmm, what/who is that exactly?". I just want 5 or 10 seconds worth of reading summarising whatever it is. Previously this was the sort of thing search engines were good for, but these days I just go straight to Wikipedia - more often than not it has an entry for whatever it is, and regardless fo whether it is of stellar quality or not it always has the basic details I need to sate my curiosity. What Wikipedia has really meant is that I can indulge my curiosity better - where previously I would have had to dig through a variety of web search results (which probably wouldn't have been worth it for the 10 second rough description of whatever it is I'm after) I can just skim read the intro to the relevant Wikipedia entry, which I can easily go straight to. If it is actually something really interesting and I want detail then there are usually references and external links I can use to track down the details properly.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
she's flat-out rejected as being a highly derivative
No sources cited
nutjob unworthy of serious attention
non-NPOV
Sorry, I'm going to have to revert this comment!
0 1 - just my two bits
As it stands, Wikipedia will never "make the grade" in academic circles for a simple reason: Academic citation is meaningless without authority -- almost by defintion -- and allowing anyone to modify entries removes any guarantee that the entries themselves are authoritative. (This situation is actually somewhat worse than that: On account of the free editing policy, any article can contain contradictory statements are different times, or even at once.) Whether Wikipedia has the qualifications for academic citation (i.e. is a source to trust your academic reputation to) is separate from whether it is useful or a valuable resource in any other context. Indeed, Wikipedia is a superb, even unparalleled resource, in many other ("softer") ways: (1) It's an excellent casual reference, as a starting point for academic research, or as a source for rounded, pithy introductions to just about anything. (2) It _is_ a source for just about anything. No other general-purpose reference source has a treatise on the decimal expansion 0.999... with 63 references or nine-page articles on foreign cartoon characters (w.r.t. America).
1) The content is in flux and what a student sees today may not be the same tomorrow.
This is a non-issue. Click "Cite this article" link. You will be provided with a citation for a non-changing version of the article in just about every bibliographical standard imaginable. Try it.
2) Wikipedia makes a good resource to find other resources.
This is a problem how?
3) I don't allow any web based content to be a primary resource (stand alone), nor am I interested in seeing papers based on encyclopedias (only) either.
That's a shame. It's really silly for you have such an irrational bias. If the sources themselves are questionable that's one thing but disallowing web sources is just stupid. What if I'm doing a paper on some draft IEEE specification that hasn't even been published in print form?
What if the online source IS the primary source? I'm supposed to cite something else because of your personal bias? That's pretty unprofessional.
You are living and the past. Teach your students how to judge the credibility of sources not arbitrary biases against specfic media formats.
Life is too short to proofread.
they'll find out what everyone else already knows -- wikipedia is prejudiced against people who actually know what they're talking about. The best information will be removed on the grounds that the submitter is biased and unreliable (never mind the tenet of criticizing the message, not the messenger). Not only is Wikipedia not interested in finding the truth, you're not even allowed to suggest that it exists.
then whoever made that regulation is a ignorant fool. So long as the information is true, the source is valid. The idea is, that any statement of fact that you make, you back up witha specific reference. If that reference is wikipedia then whoever is reading it can take the information with as large a pinch of salt as they want, and, if they know better can point out that the statement is wrong and find the source of it (because it's specifically referenced as being from wikipedia). Writing at the end 'information used in this report gathered from wikipedia, britannica & the journal of quantum physics' (or something) would be bad because whoever is reading it doesn't know which bits of information came from where or wether the author has assumed information that has turned out to be wrong, but that's a question of referencing ability, not the validity of one particular source. If the reader has reason to question an assertion, they can go and look up the reference, if it's wikipedia they can go and read the article, if they don't believe that they can go and follow its references. If it doesn't have any, they can just assume that the original statement in question cannot be substantiated and not rely on it for anything.
FGD 135
This may be a bit of an exaggeration, but a contributor needs to cite a source to say 2 and 2 is 4. This leads to quibbling over details and giving even ridiculous points of view credence; Encyclopedia Dramatica did a good job parodying this:
If you have the misfortune of looking up anything related to certain bodily processes on Wikipedia, beware of the pictures! Outright pornography (even bestiality) is present on some of them (and the articles themselves are not on a pornographic topic), and a "consensus" has formed to keep them! Why? Basically a few trolls with too much time on their hands revert the pictures whenever they're deleted and cry "Wikipedia is not censored!" or "That this picture is disgusting is not NPOV." Wikipedia treats these trolls as legitimately as anyone else and basically assumes good faith on their part (when it is quite clear they are trying to shock people and not add the photos to be informative). The blind Wikipedians have no other choice but to take their arguments seriously and try to find another policy to counter with.
The debate roughly devolves into this:
On vit, on code et puis on meurt.