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Wikipedia Breeds Unwitting Trust (Says IT Professor)
kingston writes ""As I say to my students 'if you had to have brain surgery would you prefer someone who has been through medical school, trained and researched in the field, or the student next to you who has read Wikipedia'?"
So says Deakin University associate professor of information systems, Sharman Lichtenstein, who believes Wikipedia, where anyone can edit a page entry, is fostering a climate of blind trust among people seeking information.
Professor Lichtenstein says the reliance by students on Wikipedia for finding information, and acceptance of the practice by teachers and academics, was "crowding out" valuable knowledge and creating a generation unable to source "credible expert" views even if desired.
"People are unwittingly trusting the information they find on Wikipedia, yet experience has shown it can be wrong, incomplete, biased, or misleading," she said. "Parents and teachers think it is [okay], but it is a light-weight model of knowledge and people don't know about the underlying model of how it operates.""
As any first-year college student can tell you, an encyclopedia is not meant to be an authoritative source, nor can it be used a primary source in a properly-written research paper. It is meant to be a starting point for research only. If you quote anything from an encyclopedia in a research paper, then you need to cite two additional primary souces, which must by definition be from scholarly books, journals or other information published from scholarly sources, which very clearly back up that material.
Wikipedia's achilles heal for scholarly research isn't that anyone can edit it (a statement which, in and of itself, is not 100% complete or accurate and deliberately misrepresents what Wikipedia is and is not), it's that it is an encyclopedia and nothing more.
My blog
Just like newspapers.
/. didn't pretend I just posted a comment when I didn't.
Re: misleading, I could have had first post if the fancy new posting thingy worked, or if
I wish I could filter out Yahoo answers from my entire online experience. Just about any question I've ever had for a non technical issue (e.g. Can I feed a hamster strawberries), is answered on Yahoo as : 1. Yep 2. Nope 3. Feed it motor oil 4. lolz, luzer! Yeah, the internet used to be 90% noise and 10% signal, and has improved drastically over the last decade to 99% noise! *sigh*
meh
Unfortunately, we've yet to perfect the wiki-based model where the reader doesn't have to bring their brain to the party.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
what about people who just read the references?
Deakin University
Sharman Lichtenstein
Uh-huh. Sounds like someone's already defaced the article...
I'm not sure I believe this story...
If you are using an encyclopedia for anything other than getting you started on your serious research, or satisfying a non-important curiosity, then you don't know what an encyclopedia is for. Apparently someone needs to tell this egghead.
When Wikipedia has been vetted by credible institutions as more accurate (at least outside pop-culture) then the "credible expert" Encylopedia Britannica, the trust may be unwitting but is it really unfounded.
Honestly, I find that individual experts make far more mistakes that Wiki, which is to a good degree peer reviewed.
The errors in school textbooks are well known and discussed; many still in existance after decades. So shy of hitting peer-reviewed in-field journals or, of course, doing your own research: whom, exactly, isn't "light-weight" knowledge... or, more to the point, who can be trusted more.
At least Wiki lets you go into the history and see all the editors, everythign else they've edited, what the differing opinions were, and a discussion on the topic at hand. I can't do that with my encylopedia.
I don't think that the "crowding out" phenomenon is really going to happen. There will still be technical journals and medical textbooks. No one has a medical degree from Wikipedia. It's not designed as that solution. Nobody consults Wikipedia when their life is on the line. Nobody purely learns from only Wikipedia.
From the start of this article (which was a bad analogy) to the mention of Google Knoll, I'm not impressed with this weird suggestion that Wikipedia is supposed to be the de facto source of knowledge for anyone and anything. It's great to start there or to 'get an understanding' as the article mentions but it's the sources and subsequent sources you find that have the real information. It's at least second hand information from the masses designed to be more second hand information for the masses. Not for doctors or academia.
I judged a state science fair recently and came upon a bridge project which hand one reference listed--Wikipedia. I asked the kid why he had only used these five different types of bridges and he said because that's what was listed on Wikipedia. I pretty much gave him a horrible score based on that and pointed out that the Army Corp of Engineers provides all its publications free and recommended he check that out if he wanted better information.
If you're a parent or a teacher, take the time to explain this to your children. If you're a medical doctor or expert in your field, stop fighting new technology that increases general knowledge and relax.
My work here is dung.
If we had more than one major encyclopedia online that was supported by advertisements or Federal funding to source information from it would be a boon for everyone. I mean, if they'll spend thousands for hardly used encyclopedias for public libraries, there must be a way to make that information more available in the age of the internet. This may already exist, but if it does, I haven't seen it. Perhaps other publicly available sources of information need to be more vocal about their existence?
I attended four different High Schools, and one University (so far)... NONE of them has ever accepted wikipedia as a source.
However... I do tend to read the wiki entry on any subject I am assigned to write about. I can't cite wikipedia, but it generally includes links to reputable sources.
I would try to get attention by saying 'mod me down' but since I am posting as A/C (lazyness) I doubt anyone would buy it. Thanks anyways.
I read the wikipedia article on neurosurgery and performed the operation myself.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
Now, i'm not saying wikipedia is always correct or the best for everything, but every single data source has a slant. History is written by the winners and is never like it truly has been. Encyclopedia's have had individual companies, maybe with a team, who could have been just as incorrect as wikipedia, with actually fewer eyes reviewing it. The same can go for any academic book out there. So, while any person off the street can edit it, so can anyone correct it, and I see more eyes reviewing a subject as better than less, so this trust is somewhat founded. It's not like academic experts aren't reviewing the bad edits or corporate edits on subjects and correcting them to what they should be (as numerous articles have been posted here), so what is so bad about this model? Personally, I believe it is better to have more eyes on a subject towards a consensus in a debate manner than just a handful of people researching and understanding a subject and just dishing it out to us like manna from heaven.
I would not accept having a brain surgery by somebody trained on wikipedia for sure. But I would not accept a brain surgery by anybody who has been trained by reading just one article from any book. Even if the book is recognized by the experts.
But, if I am to get a brain surgery, I will certainly go to wikipedia to have a basic understanding of what is going to happen to me. I'll also follow the links I get from there. And read whatever information I can get. It will make me capable of asking questions the next time I meet my doctor and certainly understand better what he will tell me.
I know some doctors prefer patients that do not ask questions. It just goes faster. But I think it is part of the doctor job to do what he can for the understanding of it's patient. They very very often do not. I think those doctors have a bad attitude, not their patients for asking questions.
The concept of "blind trust" as applied to public, but not professional sources, isn't new... and it certainly existed long before Wikipedia.
However, with the advent of the internet, the same fads that would have come and gone in the real world, seem to have gained a staying power that is truly incredible to behold.
I think that part of the reason is that the Internet finally gave any individual the ability to distribute "media"... wherefore previously economic barriers would have prevented the dissemination of information by most independent individuals. With this barrier gone, any cook can make a claim, and as long as the claim is ridiculous enough to attract attention, it is also certain to attract a following.
For instance, how would one explain the "Autism/Vaccination" fiasco? Talking of blind trust, here we have literally hundreds of thousands of people, who willingly and knowingly ignore multiple large-scale peer-reviewed studies, only to put their faith into something that can only be described as an internet fad, started by some really sad an unfortunate parents, looking to place the blame for the tragic condition that befell their child.
The question is - what is there to be done about this. To be honest, I think that the situation can go both ways. We could slowly mature in our understanding of how the Internet works, and accept it as a public forum, with all the positive and negative implications that come with such a place. Or we could continue down into the rabbit hole of collective ignorance, into a future that I, for one, would not want to experience... a future where truth is no longer a function of fact, but a function of how many supporters an idea has.
The analogy of the brain surgery is pretty light-weight, inappropriate, and jejune for a professor. The professor's position is a bit arrogant, suggesting I don't know enough to use the right tool for a given job. Also, no sensible person expects Wikipedia to be The One Tool, nor does anyone with experience and judgment rely upon one source, especially on the Internet. Sounds like the professor could learn a thing or two.
who charges more?
Wow, it's very difficult to not compare the bad idea of going to Wiki for some kinds of unbiased information to coming to some very biased anti-microsoft tech news sites for microsoft news. So I won't avoid making the comparison.
Cogito Ergo Sum
My point is that it is not a problem with Wikipedia; it is a problem with accepting unsourced statements.
But there is also the issue that Wikipedia is often right and we humans tend to approximate the probability that a source provides correct information and trust any new information from that source per that probability. A side effect is that if one fails to continue to verify the verity of a fact, one continues to use an old estimate of the trustworthiness of the source. But this is not Wikipedia's fault.
As others have pointed out, more or less: shouldn't the school be teaching the students instead of complaining that the students don't know important things?
I distinctly remember learning about proper sources way back in elementary school, and then in middle school, and in high school.
Blabla ivory tower blabla better than tho commoners blablabla I am more important blablablabla.
Shakespeare poems - infinite monkeys with infinite time.Computer tech support - a few trained ones working from 9 to 5.
Because nobody ever believed stuff they read on the Internet before Wikipedia came along?
How is Wikipedia the cause of this problem? It seems like Wikipedia might be part of the solution. Unlike most of the unsourced data you find on the World Wide Web, Wikipedia actually has a framework that encourages citing references and sources.
Old idea, old news... This has been discussed (or at least I've already known it and teach others) not to trust Wiki. I directly link and relate it to the COI, or COST OF INFORMATION. If I have to PAY for information like a journal or subscription, I will hold the people accountable because of that premium. But Wiki is "FREE" so if I read something wrong, I laugh and keep going...
People who plan for malice take advantage of Wiki's "open" model and hack it up for their own agenda.
BTW, So Does Newpaper and TV, but I don't pay for them... TV is free and newspapers I rairly purchase, it is usually in the breakroom.
All of this kinda goes with the saying "I read it on the internet, so it MUST be true."
20 Years ago when the "internet" was a collection of colleges and DARPA machines, yes... Today, not so much, garbage in - garbage out.
--- Relax, that mass muderer is just trying to reduce our carbon footprint, one fetus at a time...
Most people who look up wikipedia information don't act on it. Those who do will not invest much of their time or money based purely on what wikipedia tells them - if they do, they won;t do it a second time.
Most of the information discovered is trivial: how many pints in a gallon, or some such. Users don't use wikipedia to decide what investments to make - at least the rich ones don't.
Therefore asking if people "trust" the answers is the wrong question. A better one would be "how much of your own money would you stake on the answer being correct?" Ask that and you'll get a much lower response.
Personally I'd like to see educators "seed" wikipedia with answers that cover the course work they set. The information they place in the relevant topics would be correct, but use catch-phrases so they can detect who is lazy and merely plagiarises someone elses work.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Im a 2nd year electrical engineering student at one of the top universities in Canada and in some of my programs, they now specify a minimum number of references and at least half of your references for something have to be from a peer reviewed journal and no more than one from wikipedia. Some of this seems to be out of genuine concern for making sure your information is correct. But with Wikipedia having been proven to be nearly as accurate as Encyclopedia Britanica (http://science.slashdot.org/science/05/12/15/1352207.shtml?tid=95&tid=14) and here (http://slashdot.org/articles/07/07/24/0114228.shtml) the rest of it seems to come from a group of people who are scared whitless that nobody will ever be forced to read their life's work. I've also been driven violently angry by spending an order of magnitude more time hunting through poorly setup journal databases for what should've been an easy find as actually doing the assignment.
I've been saying this for years and I'm not even a professor. I automatically discount the validity of any person who quotes wikipedia as a source but I give them the respect of at least looking to see what the people have said in the article that they link to.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
As opposed to what: Newspapers? Schools' history books? It's a bit silly to criticize only Wikipedia and none of the other sources accepted by schoolteachers.
Agreed. To the professor: welcome to the club. We get it already that you feel threatened, though there is nothing to feel threatened about. Thanks for looking out for the unwashed masses, they evidently need all the help they can get.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Someone should explain to this guy about the relatively new inventions of the newspaper and TV news. Both have "crowded out credible sources of information". The most trusted guy in American used to be Walter Cronkite. Although I had no reason to distrust Walt, he wasn't a primary source of information.
All ideas^H^H^H^H^Hprocesses in this post are Patent Pending. (as well as the process of patenting all postings)
The Internet can have a strong influence on the weak-minded.
Ergonomica Auctorita Illico!
any book in the library can be just as biased, incomplete, and inaccurate as wikipedia... so too can be any writing from any scholar that is found in a public university. Most folks know that you shouldn't base your opinions and come to conclusions with only one source... even most of those kids that quote wikipedia... duh.
As a teacher (11-18) I actually encourage the use of wikipedia as a first stop for information gathering. It gives me a really good way into explaining words such as 'bias' and 'reliable' to students. As long as you explain the things wrong with the website I don't understand the fuss. To be fair, information found on wikipedia is a lot more accurate than the majority on information on the internet. Most pupil's don't even bother reading the information they find, they just copy and paste it (leading to post-grad level work in year 7 student homework). You pretty much have to spend an entire lesson explaining how to gather information and the pitfalls. Wikipedia isn't banned because it's a bad website, it's banned because teachers don't explain how to use it properly.
... who don't know how to spell "plagiarism."
Headline says: "Wikipedia Breeds Unwitting Trust"
:) But we tend to want to accept such statements as truth, even when we know better. Humans seem to have an inherent, unconscious willingness to trust that domatic statements must be true.
My first thought: s/Breeds/Highlights/
In general, I find most of the articles that complain about such-and-such a problem with Wikipedia stop too soon. It isn't that Wikipedia is often incorrect, or that Wikipedia articles lack verifiable sources, or that people are too quick to trust what's written in Wikipedia, or that Wikipedia is easily subverted by people with their own agenda. While those statements are all true, they're simply special cases of a far more insidious trend: People put too much trust in information.
Newspaper articles, scientific studies, engineering decisions, information in general suffers from all the same problems. How often do we see someone make a statement, claiming things are a certain way, but with no way to check on it? Just about every post on Slashdot, for starters.
Wikipedia simply highlights this problem.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
Isn't the professor presenting a Straw man argument here? Nobody would ever compare an encyclopedia to a long course of hands on training and intensive work.
(Many surgeons train for 3 or 4 years AFTER they become a doctor before they get to be considered proper surgeons by their peers)
Professor Lichtenstein (or Lichy to her friends?) assumes that all of us blindly trust wikipedia. I don't. I don't know anybody who hasn't doubted the truth of a wikipedia article. She already knows the solution - don't let students cite wikipedia, so its hard to see what her problem is?
Is she mad that people are contributing their knowledge for free, while she expects to be paid? What a terrible blow Wikipedia has inflicted on our poor starving experts.
Associate professor at Deakin? How prestigious.
I would trust peer reviewed Wikipedia articles backed up with other sources; over biased Deakin lecture power point slides (that can't be contributed to) anyway.
"Those who can, do. Those who cannot, teach. The rest understand binary and work at Deakin U."
A couple of years ago when I was working on my final project for my electronics degree, I was very much aware that any mention of wikipedia in my references would destroy my grade. As such even if wikipedia gives good information, you still have to follow the references elsewhere, and check on the information to find a decent reference. All students SHOULD know not to trust wikipedia.
...but it still isn't going to keep people from making these assertions. Wikipedia has changed nothing but the scope of information covered by encyclopaedic content. The ignorant sods who considered Brittanica and World Book a reliable source twenty years ago are the same geniuses that quote Wikipedia on research papers. Rampant prejudice specifically directed at Wikipedia exists only because of gross misunderstanding of its peer review format and a general bias against the great evil that is (*GASP*) technology.
*Someone* (either those who are against or those who are for Wikipedia here, or both) does not understand the difference between research and citation. Wikipedia is an excellent research tool, and the professors are wrong to say otherwise - but you cannot cite it as a source, and a student would be foolish to do so.
You can research a subject by entering it into Google, but you wouldn't cite the Google results page in a paper. Instead, you read what the results say, find out where they got their information from, and trace the facts back to an authority you can safely cite.
With Wikipedia, these authorities and the facts are handily edited, summarized and cited neatly at the end, but it works the same way as the Google search.
I think I can see the origin of this confusion. When I was in high school, the teachers were paranoid about us plagiarizing stuff from somewhere, and therefore were leaning on us to mention every book we'd so much as seen the cover of during research. This was because the books were all primary sources.
Once you research on the web, you're dealing with secondary sources (or further than that), and these should *not* be cited as they are not authoritative on their own.
He's so right, and yet so wrong. The problem of inaccuracy has been with us from the beginning. Plenty of Respected And Accredited[tm] people with fancy titles have turned out to be dead wrong, making stuff up, plaggiarizing, and so on and so forth. Walk into any bookstore and pick a couple random books. Most aren't learned or terribly accurate. In fact, most are crap. So the problem isn't wikipedia. It isn't any more or less trustable than any other popular publication.
The problem remains, and, as I see it, is part of a greater problem in that we fail to instill the proper attitude regarding this. Compare Feynman's writings on people's failures to grasp proper use of Scientific Method. It's something we expect people will pick up by themselves. Same thing here: We expect people will figure out by themselves that not everything that is written is necessairily true, accurate, or right.
I see the proliferation and success(!) of the Intelligent Design movement as a good example of the failure to do this. We the scientists have failed to come up with a formal study of methods and means that should've filtered most of the crap out the first minute it popped up. Now what are we going to do about it? Discuss.
Wikipedians do exactly the same things. For all the talk of NPOV on every discussion page, it's little more than talk. Almost every music related page is essentially fan site, and spam too -- music is a commercial product, from an evil industry. For some bizarre reason people don't equate music promotion with spam. And there's music spam on most other pages too - e.g. "xyz" wrote a song about "Cyprus" or whatever.
And then there's the much noted cabals. Political pages, religion pages, controversial authors, you name it - there's groups working every hour of every day to ensure the facts are as they see them.
And then theres the Wikipedia admins... the real problem with the site. Some of them have been proven to be frauds, to have criminal convictions -- and yet they manipulate facts, they have their own little agendas, they block entire countries IP addresses, or the addresses of individuals they dislike (or who are protesting the nature of an article). "Vandalism" isn't necessary vandalism -- they've never actually defined that word. It's like "terrorism" is to a newspaper - a license to do what you like in the name of "truthiness". Would Galileo be a vandal, would Rosa Parks? Is Stephen Colbert?
What's non-notable and who has the right to decide, why even decide, what the problem if it's not very notable but not spam? This is just like the way news editors manipulate facts and decide who's flavor of the month.
And then there's Jimbo... good old Jimbo. His relationship with Wikiality, his "misunderstanding" of non-profit and commercial, and "expenses". And his much documented, and much flawed history. Not to mention his autocracy and views on Ayn Rand.
How is Jimbo different from Rupert Murdoch? I see very little difference. Well... other than Jimbo has so far managed to mislead people into thinking that Wikipedia is "open" and somehow "open source" -- when the reality is far, far from that.
The Professor is just upset because the number of elephants in his class has tripled in the past six months.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
As I say to my students 'if you had to have brain surgery would you prefer someone who has been through medical school, trained and researched in the field, or the student next to you who has read Wikipedia'?
As someone who uses wikipedia quite frequently, I would like to answer "what a stupid question that is" and ask the idiot professor "if you had to have brain surgery would you prefer someone who has been through medical school, trained and researched in the field, or the student next to you who has read the encyclopedia Britannica?'
I'd also ask him, if you were on a desert island with two people who were not medical doctors and suffered appendicitis, would you rather have your surgery from the one who has read the wikipedia article on appendicitis or the one who can't read?
But since the professor doesn't trust wikipoedia I looked him up in the Uncyclopedia, which actually has a news item on the subject today.
The topic is proof that a PhD is not proof of intelligence. I have known some very intelligent PhDs and some moronic ones, and discovered that the morons always add "PhD" to the end of their name, while you may know the smart ones for years before discovering that they have ever been through grad school. My money says this guy puts "PhD" in his written signature.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
I left college for about a decade, and in that time, the rise of Wiki and other, far more dubious intenet sources, has done surprisingly little to change how research skills are taught. It used to be "Find it in print." Now it is "find it somewhere other than Wikipedia." As far as I can tell, Wikipedia bashing from the ivory tower is a poor and easy substitute for doing a good job educating students about how to do quality research, and why it matters. Wikipedia can be integrated responsibly provided knowledge seekers are vigilant, as they should be with any source.
The fight over Wikipedia has become a proxy battle between the democratization of information and the entrenched authorities on knowledge. Instead of spending so much time and effort in attempting to destroy the reputation of Wikipedia, perhaps the public would be better served by these same authorities making a case for critical thinking skills. The dangers of a poor understanding of credibililty have far more dangerous implications than the professor's grasping analogy; WMD, Saddam Hussein planned 9-11, Yellowcake Uranium, "We do not torture," and just about anything aired on Faux News.
As an aside, I wrote a "well researched" paper for a 'No Wikipedia' professor that detailed the global benefits of the undeniable US victory in Vietnam. When he declared the factual foundation of the paper pure crap, I pointed out that it was researched and cited meticulously, and as per his rules (no Wikipedia) the research was considered sound. It was quite cathartic.
If anything, Wikipedia teaches kids not to have blind trust in self-proclaimed experts, both on the Internet and off. The "trusted expert" gimmick has been used to lie in advertising and politics since the beginning of mass media. It's so damn obvious, you have to seriously question the intelligence and/or agenda of anyone parroting the "Wikipedia is full of lies!" meme. (Yes, I'm laughing at you, Andrew Keen.)
wrong, incomplete, biased, or misleading
And of course nobody has ever received info with these qualities in a University.
Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
I stayed at a Best Western hotel last night, I can do anything.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
This is why every middle school (or at least high school) should have a class on Wikipedia as standard curriculum. How it works, how to contribute, how to verify, standard procedures, etc.
Wikipedia (or at the very least, open, collaborative knowledge) is not going away. It's stupid to keep complaining about how kids don't know how to use it properly, let's start teaching them the proper way to use it.
"fostering a climate of blind trust among people seeking information"
Funny, when it comes to Wikipedia, there's no end of people telling us how we can't trust what we read, and we need to be careful what we use it for, and check the sources. Even Wikipedia itself is honest about telling you that an article lacks sources, is biased or may not be reliable.
It's with every other source that people give their blind trust to - whether it's other encyclopedias, books, the media, or, evidently, University Professors.
If Wikipedia has made people be careful of what we read, that's a good thing. I only wish people would engage their brain more often, and use that sceptism with every other thing they read or hear.
If they've got such a problem with it, maybe they shouldn't charge $90 for their textbooks. Or thousands of dollars for their expertise.
Wikipedia doesn't thrive because we don't care about standards of evaluation; Wikipedia thrives because curious, thirsty minds seek answers they can afford and are available. I can, with my cell phone, answer just about any question I have, and Wikipedia is the easiest way to go about it.
If there's a tremendous worry that Wikipedia is somehow destroying academic integrity, I'm going to need a free, web-based solution, that has the support of a developer community that cares enough to write a website that formats the whole kit-and-caboodle for my iPhone (or for your Treo, or Blackberry for that matter) that allows me to, at a few concise clicks, satisfy my thirst for knowledge. I'm sick of hearing all the griping about Wikipedia, because it's whole purpose is to fulfill the job we're allegedly paying all this money at institutions for: procurement of knowledge. And these hooligans are trying to give it away for free... preposterous. Sometimes I don't want to know the nuances of the issue, I'm just trying to find who the NBA's scoring leader was, or what, for purposes of the article I'm reading, *is* a Boson Particle.
I can't read a book every time I've got a question, I'd literally do nothing at that point. Hell, I barely have the time to use Wikipedia to answer my question. I've got a lot of questions but having a phone on me with Wikipedia access means more of my questions get answered. Until there's a substitute that these people (charging thousands upon thousands for their answers in the form of collegiate education) can provide that helps me with that problem (my insatiable curiosity) Wikipedia's a gamble I'm willing to take. If something sounds unreasonable, I'll try and verify it elsewhere, but it doesn't particularly matter, it wasn't too long ago that Professors and Academics were up in arms about any internet sources; who knows who and what I can trust on the web.
I just want my questions answered people.
Didn't we, not too long ago, think that the sun revolved around the Earth? Whatever we have at the time we write what we write is just that - wrong or not. It is up to the user to *cough*trust but verify...
That's not to say I won't go do some brain surgery after reading an article about it, but in reality, an encyclopedia is great for refreshing my memory on stuff I already know.
There is a certain tyranny of expertise - particularly in academia. No matter how well researched, thought out, or tested a particular product is (whether it be object or manuscript), it will be snubbed unless the author/inventor has 'Doctor' after his/her name.
I used to think the institutions of higher learning were composed of open minded people - until I went to school. With rare exception this is not the case - dogma wins out over discourse. The unwitting student stumbles into this minefield of vested interests - the teacher actively attempts to suppress the heretical concepts, or more commonly brushes them under the rug with little comment and much condescension.
While professors challenge their students to think critically and with an open mind, they should also take that same advise to heart.
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
I'm surprised at how many people here are defending Wikipedia. When I first discovered it, I thought it was a great project. Now, I think it's not-so-great.
The problem I see is not factual inaccuracies (they exist but are comparatively easy to correct), but lack of rigor and a tendency to transparently pass-through the authors' biases.
When I say "bias," I am not necessarily referring to political opinions or prejudices. Those are examples but not, even, the most common. A bias is simply something that inclines one to think a certain way without realizing why, and especially without taking the trouble to consider and refute contrary propositions. For instance, Wikipedia's proponents (defenders? apologists?) are fond of saying that Wikipedia's open model makes it less biased than, say, a copyrighted encyclopedia. That's a biased statement itself -- it fails to consider, for example, the possibility that authors may be more inclined to rigorous fact-checking when they're being paid for their efforts, or the possibility that some opinions may be just wrong in spite of having vocal proponents who insist on getting a free soapbox in the name of "balance".
Finally, a rebuttal to the defense that "it's just an encyclopedia." Would you consult an encyclopedia, any encyclopedia, where 50% of the articles were known to be utterly false? Would you tolerate a 25% error rate? The question I pose is, what error rate really is acceptable and does Wikipedia exceed that rate, or not? My experience is a sample size of about 20 articles and in that sample, the rate of error or omission is about 20%. For me, that's far too high -- but I admit that's a biased analysis. ;-)
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
24Hr news spews out increasing volumes of unqualified content. Daily tabloids spew out sensationalistic headlines with tunnel vision content. Wikipedia is doctored by those who wish to influence. Eventually , even the dumb-asses will get it. THINK FOR YOURSELF , it's healthy to be sceptical.
And in this case the causality actually goes in reverse order. It is because this generation is not trained in logical thinking and are trained to make judgments based on the majority opinion of their peers that they are so blindingly trusting of anything that is written.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
well, one of them is rather dumb, but still:
how about each wikipedia article having a prominent counter of the edits and rollbacks it has received since posting?
how about giving readers the chance to rank the article on, say, three criteria: authenticity, clarity, depth (OK, these were off the top of my head).
would that allow some people to judge whether they should trust the article?
Chat with other atheists http://secularchat.org
Wikipedia does far more good than harm. The problem isn't using Wikipedia as a source, but using it extensively. For example, I just gave a presentation on gages for my Mechanical Engineering lab. The lab writeup said something about a piezo-reisistive pressure sensor, and I had no idea what that was. I went to wikipedia because it took about 2 seconds to get there, and it told me that it uses semiconductors whose resistence changes depending on the force exerted on them, and that can be used to calculate pressure. Instead of taking a long trip to the library to search from some book on pressure gages, I found my answer to a very small part of the presentation in about 20 seconds so I had more time to work on the rest of the presentation. This is what Wikipedia is perfect for.
I just stayed at a Holiday Inn Express. Less aggravation.
Blind trust is a human problem and has been around since the beginning. Allow me to burn some karma by bringing up a few examples:
1. Religion. We start in on kids from the moment they spring from the womb, filling their heads with all sorts of bullshit. And why shouldn't they believe it? Mother and father are telling me it is so! The priest, the teacher, the shaman, all confirm what they say. How could I believe otherwise? Sure, it looks like bread and wine but the priest waved his hands over it, mumbled some magic words in latin, and now I know it is the flesh and blood of my lord and savior. The priest promises this ritual cannibalism will bring me to heaven. He also tells me that what we do together is not a bad thing, not a sin, even when he touches me there, even when it hurts.
2. Cultural bullshit. Take a look at any intractable ethnic problem like Jews and Palestinians, Catholics and Protestants, Yankees and Red Sox fans, you're looking at the product of trusting kids being fed a steady diet of their parents' bullshit. By the time they're having children of their own, they've taken the bullshit for their own and pass that ignorance along as a treasured tradition. "Damn them Jews, damn them Arabs, they wronged us years ago!" God forbid the kids might grow up to devise a solution to the problem, endless bloodshed is so much more productive.
I could go on and fill more pages so I'll just leave it at the news media. It's been said that Americans are the only people on the planet who believe their own government's propaganda. I'm sure there are probably a few out there more gullible but we're certainly the biggest and most embarrassing. Government spokesmen will come out and make bald-faced lies and the so-called journalists do not call them on it. Gullible sheeple will watch the news and take the denials as truth. "Who could have possibly predicted that a hurricane could have hit New Orleans? I certainly have to give the President that. I'm sure no one ever brought the possibility up to him, not even as the hurricane was bearing down on the city and NOAA issued warnings of chaos and destruction on a biblical scale." A false statement made with great certainty and not contradicted by the so-called journalists will be taken as fact by the contented, unthinking audience.
Ok, so we can't question religion with science, we can't point our fingers and laugh when bible-thumping morons insist that Noah's Ark is a true story. So we can't beat the priests over the head with science. But then we get politicians setting policy on matters that fall under the jurisdiction of science and they use religion as the guideline? They use pure politics in their calculation and not only ignore but suppress the scientific evidence? "Hey, I think putting a power drill through someone's skull might be harmful." "There are some scientists who would dispute that." "Well fuck me, I don't have a counter to that!" And where is the outrage in all of this, where are the villagers with pitchforks ready to cast the liars out on their asses? I don't even hear crickets, they're probably home watching America's Next Celebrity Suicide.
So we're supposed to be outraged that people might not do their own BS check when reading Wikipedia? Folks, if that were our only problem in this country, we'd be doing fine.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Wikipedia is actually much better than newspaper in this regard. When reading newspaper, you have no way to see the opinions of anybody other than the members of the editorial board of the newspaper. In Wikipedia, at least you can view the history of the article and the discussion page if the Wiki-page is heavy-handed by a group of people with a particular political, commercial or whatever stand. The only thing good about newspaper is that it is so obviously biased that nobody will trust it.
Sorry, but by it's own admission, Wiki is not edittable by everyone. And the includes some GLARING errors. Sometimes it is good, sometimes bad. Let's look at an example:
John Kerry is a whole article. There are good sections of it, but more biased towards John than against. I dropped in to check it out and found 2 errors in the article. These were errors of fact, not opinions. The article is locked from edits, except by certain editors, so I went to the discussion page and entered the 2 errors there.
I was "told" by the editors that I was wrong, and that I had no place entering that data. I persisted, and then found and gave them a cite for one of the facts - John Kerry's own website and some of the few military documents he posted there. The second error was so damming to his campaign that he removed the documents from his site, and posted a restriction so that the documents in question were also purged from the wayback machine! (The misssing documents prove that he lied about his discharge status, but only if you know how to read them.)
It was after citing the website that the editors corrected one of the factual errors. The other is still wrong to this day, but there is no way to cite it to correct it until the day when John Kerry releases his full military records. (Don't hold your breath).
No Text
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
When I eventually require brain surgery to repair the damage done by idiots on the Internet, I will go see a licensed brain surgeon, yes.
.400 or how many times Towlie, the alien weed smoking towel, appears in South Park.
But that's not the point.
I don't use Wikipedia to perform self-surgery. I use Wikipedia to figure out which season Ted Williams hit
You don't need gatekeepers for that. They don't *have* gatekeepers for that. And if we, as a society, decide that we *do* need gatekeepers for that, sign me up for a Ph.D. in South Park Studies.
Professionals like the author in the O.P. are squirming because they think the Internet is going to threaten their careers. It won't. It'll just change them. The Internet makes it easier for someone to fill out their will online, but it won't replace lawyers in the courtroom. We're talking about two different things. The fact that the author in the OP doesn't realize that is a much, much bigger indictment of his analysis than wikigroaning is for his students.
It seems to me like Wikipedia is getting it from all sides.
..and now we have people like this (and others) trying to poke holes in Wikipedia's credibility.
We have people in the intelligence community whose job seems to be managing/editing wikipedia entries on the sly.
We have politicians changing their own pages and removing anything unflattering, regardless of truth.
We have allegations of using influence to possibly get Racheal Marsden's page altered which would be slightly unethical (but something I am sure she would gladly do).
But here's the thing - thoughout all of that it is transparent. We know about it. If Wikipedia were a corporation or other closed model - this same sort of stuff would go on and we wouldn't know about it - or even worse, things that could upset powerful politicians or corporations may not even make it in.
Wikipedia may not be perfect, but I think it is amazing and amazingly trustable - BECAUSE of the transparency, and BECAUSE anybody can participate. It's not like someone can go on there and change important facts without it being caught - and usually it is caught within less than a minute.
Wikipedia as a system is designed to cope with any and all of these issues, and I (personally) find it much more up-to-date, credible, and comprehensive than any other encyclopedic source.
No, this isn't true at all!
Wikipedia is not "breeding" or creating blind trust. What it quite possibly does it exposing blind trust that already exists - trust in authority (or perceived authority), trust in encyclopedias, and so on.
It's not Wikipedia that's the problem, it's the lack of scepticism and media competence among students (and people in general). Wikipedia's just making it obvious that this problem exists, but if anything, we should be thankful for that, since you need to be aware that there is a problem before you can fix it.
Don't shoot the messenger.
Looking something up in wikipedia is like asking your friend who took an undergraduate course in it last semseter for info on the topic. It's likely to be reasonably accurate much of the time, and should give you some ideas of where to look for more thorogh information, but it's not citable and shouldn't be relied on for anything where accuracy is important. It's a very helpful resource for what it is.
The answer isn't doing away with Wikipedia. If people are blindly trusting ANY resource, THAT is the root problem. We need to do more to teach information literacy, how to evaluate the reliability of sources, and the importance of using multiple sources.
Teaching critical thinking skills is more important than it has ever been. Trying to hide inaccurate information from people is just shirking this responsibility. People will have inaccurate information thrown at them whether they are looking for information or not. There is no substitute for solid critial thinking.
Which is fine if you're seeking a general overview of a subject, as most undergraduates are. One should no more trust it than any other single source.
As for academia, it is a heavy-weight model, top-loaded with egotistical professionals who will smite you down for not obeying-- sorry, agreeing with them, and the people who use Wikipedia heavily don't know much if anything about the underlying model of how it operates.
How about this? Create an alternative to Wikipedia administered by professionals in the various fields and see how many people find it useful.
... beginning college students typically don't know what constitutes "good research". And they tend to be very trusting, not just of Wikipedia, but of anything on the Internet.
A few years ago I had a student turn in a paper arguing that the drinking age should be lowered to 18. One of the claims the paper raised was that drinking ages are lower in many European countries, and that they have healthier drinking cultures. That's probably true, but the source that the student cited to back up the point was totally inadequate. It was a two paragraph account of German drinking habits. The account was based on an interview with an unnamed exchange student. It was written down by an anonymous high school student. And it was put up on the web as a really badly designed web page. Let's see - anonymous author, anonymous interview subject, obviously done as part of a high school assignment, very short, no details, and badly presented. Not exactly the world's most credible source. I made the student go find a more thorough account of European drinking habits written by an identifiable human being and vetted by some kind of editor.
That's a fairly typical example. However, I don't think it's anything worth getting upset about. Students have long been overly credulous. Heck, people in general are overly credulous. It's always been possible to go out, find crappy information, and blindly accept it. Wikipedia (and more broadly the Internet) just make that easier. Yes, there's a lot of GOOD info out there on the web, too, but finding it can be very difficult.
That being the case, I try to integrate assignments about how you do research, and what constitutes a good source, what Internet sources are good for, and when you might want to hit the library and dig a little deeper. It's really a necessity. The students don't know how to do research; therefore, we need to teach them. Many schools are beginning to recognize this -- over the last ten years or so the number of positions at academic libraries for "instructional librarians" has skyrocketed. They visit other teachers' classes and teach lessons on search techniques, evaluation of sources, give tours of the specialized databases the university subscribes to, and so on. Some schools are even beginning to offer complete courses on information literacy. I think we'll probably see a good bit more of this over the next few years.
Why do you think commercials have those guys in white coats and glasses? Why is "will it blend" so funny?
I'm sorry, I can't find that text on that page. It must have been peer reviewed and found fallacious.
Not So Random
Until high school textbooks or the mainstream media under go the same revision and updating that any wiki goes thru. I can see what people mean by ivory tower academia. No, you don't want anyone operating on you based on what they read on Wikipedia, but what the hell kind of example is that? Does that kind of hyperbole real make any kind of point? "Don't trust everything you read". Gosh, really? Thanks Doc!
Fiat Homos et Pereat Theos
Finally, a rebuttal to the defense that "it's just an encyclopedia." Would you consult an encyclopedia, any encyclopedia, where 50% of the articles were known to be utterly false? Would you tolerate a 25% error rate? The question I pose is, what error rate really is acceptable and does Wikipedia exceed that rate, or not? My experience is a sample size of about 20 articles and in that sample, the rate of error or omission is about 20%. For me, that's far too high -- but I admit that's a biased analysis. ;-)
I'm calling you out on this one. Wikipedia holds content equating to thousands of times the degree of information available in a standard print encyclopedia. The majority of articles of any real importance on Wikipedia are kept spic and spam at all times by a team of a rabid fact-hounds, and the inaccurate garbage (to which you ascribe a questionable 20% occurrence) is generally restricted to the host of articles so obscure or specific that they would be omitted in a standard encyclopedia anyway! How maGeorge Packer Berry was the Dean of Harvard Medical School (1949-1965) and had a much wiser approach to information. In an address to students at the Medical School, he said, "Half of what we are going to teach you is wrong, and half of it is right. Our problem is that we don't know which half is which."
You need to check information from any source when it matters to you. You think that published books are always better? Check this one out: Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your High School History Texbook Got Wrong by James W. Loewen. Indeed, according to one study, Most scientific papers are probably wrong. One study found that Wikipedia and Encyclopedia Britannica had similar error rates.
Wikipedia is new, so it's forcing people to notice something that was always true about any information, but that they've been ignoring up to now: You need to check information that's important to you.
- David A. Wheeler (see my Secure Programming HOWTO)
...have common mistakes such as "the longer path on the top of the wing causes the air to move faster creating lift" (loosely quoted). Very little is questioned and I doubt that even the teacher will look to the source of the material before spouting it to the unwitting receptacles in his/her class.
Wikipedia will never be a reliable source for sociological, economical, historical, or political content. Take the article about Continuation War for example. It is alternatively biased towards the Finns (miraculous victory of 1944, superiority of Finnish troops), the Russians (Finnish Nazi affiliation, concentration camps, and genocide), or the British (an RAF squadron in Murmansk that purportedly shot down dozens of Finnish planes despite no records of such engagements or losses existing).
It is however a pretty good starting point for physical sciences and mathematics. There isn't going to be bias in the article about commutative algebras. I still wish there were more references to textbooks in most of the scientific articles.
I've just RTFA. My advice to others: don't bother.
What we have here is a report based on a single "authority" that states the obvious, twisted to support her own view of the value of her personal educational experiences.
Wikipedia is exactly what it purports to be: the wisdom of the crowds. Such wisdom is never authoritative; and it often requires further checking. It is, however, very broad: compared to its nearest competitor, Wikipedia provides access to hundreds of thousands more articles that span nearly the entire range of human experience. Due to its open editing policy, Wikipedia is also generally free from the biases of authorities who are pushing their own agenda: egregious offenses are usually identified and corrected fairly quickly; more subtle biases are often identified in parenthetical clauses that contain links to opposing views.
Considering its breath and speed of usage, arguing against a student's usage of Wikipedia because it is not written by authorities is akin to telling a scribe of ancient Egypt that he should not use the Library at Alexandria because the penmanship on some of the scrolls is sloppy.
When searching for the truth, no authority should ever be accepted without question as having the final or best answer. For instance, an associate professor of information systems at Deakin University named Sharman Lichtenstein got an article about her belief in Higher Authorities published in Computerworld. Before accepting her hierarchal belief structure as your own, you should see if there are any opposing views, which might show up in a place like the slashdot commentaries. Then you should form your own judgment.
For myself, where Wikipedia really shines is when I have to learn about something that is common knowledge but is outside my own personal experience. Perhaps I need a quick review of the law of cosines to make sense of something I've encountered in an article on signal processing: Wikipedia is the first place to go. Perhaps I want to know the characteristics that distinguish a 1957 Thunderbird from later models: Wikipedia is the place to start. Often in these kinds of cases, I don't have to research any further than the Wikipedia article. I can often determine that what I have found in Wikipedia is in the huge heap of things called "common knowledge" (even though I might not be familiar with that particular item), which means that I can use it without looking any further. Also, I really don't have to cite my source in these cases, since this item is going to be easily and unambiguously found by anyone else who goes looking for it, no matter where they look.
can people keep track of more than one concept in their minds at a time?
the issue with trust is that it exists in tension between two competing, and valid, concerns: trusting too much, and trusting too little
the professor's criticism of wikipedia starts with a bad assumption: that a trustworthy website is a valid concept, achievable in a world populated by human beings, all of them with agendas, manipulating the media they make with purposeful propganda, outright sutpidity, or simply acting in good faith, but blind to their own prejudices
NO website, anywhere, deserves 100% trust. furthermore, NO ONE visiting wikipedia is reading the articles there and believing it 100%, without a shred of doubt
once you realize those two things, you value wikipedia for what it is: a useful compendium of lore and knowledge, interspersed with the random human hiccups of propaganda, lies, vandalism, stupidity, mischievous manipulation, naivete, harmless jokes, etc. that all of us encounter every day of our lives. that we are all familiar with. on the level of the average bullshit meter all of us develop in our lives a ssocial human beings, familiar with the ways in which other human beings around us don't get it 100%, but are still valuable to us, even though fundamentally flawed
the problem with the idea of contemplating human beings as total sheep that believe everything they read is that this concept is a complete myth. it is invented by well-meaning but hysterical twits whose fear is of the common man. that the common man needs some sort of ideological guidance, whether from the left or the right, or he will screw up and believe some sort of demagoguery in the disguise of a news channel, or an online encyclopedia, or a religious man's sermon. no. the common joe blow has a brain, and he has enocuntered bullshit in his life before, and he can sniff it out again when it is in front of him. no, really. get over yourself if you think you are some great savior of the naive or that they need saving. you are the one who is naive if you believe this. do not fear the common man. if you do, you are the one who is out of touch. you are the problem, not the solution. the common man, yes, includes the ignorant, the stupid, and the propagandized. but by no means in the majority. so lose your elitist snobby anti-democratic impulses if you fear or loathe the common man: YOU are the problem if you do
everyone has a bullshit detector, to some degree. and if they don't, do you really think the antidote to the couple of morons who believe everything they read is to make the media availble to them completely bulletproof, or that such impervious media is even possible? no, you simply accept that gullible morons exist. you can't protect idiots from themselves. and then you move on
and once you realize that, you leave wikipedia the way it is, and recognize its flaws, and value it as a compendium nonetheless. as if the old encyclopedia model of a bunch of supposedly neutral scribes working in passionless isolation is a model that gives us complete agendless trustworthy neutrality? you believe that is possible? please!
the fallacies in the professor's ceritique of wikipedia is striking. he smacks of elitist fear of the common man. we get it: wikipedia isn't 100% trustworthy. duh! why is this such a horrible concept for some people to accept? they believe agendaless media is possible? ALL MEDIA IS BIASED. EVERYWHERE. ALWAYS HAS BEEN. ALWAYS WILL BE. GET OVER IT
or you are part of the problem. a spastic hysterical ivory tower of ideological purity is not what this world needs. it has enough kneejerk partisans. oh, you thought your search for completely neutrality was what you are after? doesn't exist friend. you have an agenda. you do. become aware of yourself. if you believe your pov is neutral, or if that a completely neutral pov is even possible, you are perhaps the most propagandized of all: blind to one's own nature. we are ALL ideologically compromised. every single one of us. if you can't see
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I am a student of Information Technology at the University this 'professor' works at, and let me tell you something: I've gotten a hell of alot of my information from Wikipedia, and I feel I'm doing pretty well so far. When I do my IT Fundamentals quizzes, guess where I go when there's an answer I didn't know: Wikipedia (If the textbook doesn't help enough). And my last score? 97.5%.
According to my 151 teacher, the teachers at Deakin have varying opinions, even at higher levels in the staff. I don't really care, however - It's THE single most useful resource for everything I want to learn, and I've never found myself dudded by the information.
Also, the teacher I have that is 'against' Wikipedia for educational purposes is someone I find myself often correcting. He is a teacher of GAMES, and runs the GAMES course, and stated the CPU speed of the PS3 and Xbox 360 as under 600mhz. I know that it's closer to 3ghz - 3.2 I believe. Guess where I learned that. And is it right? Hmm, look at this here Xbox 360 box... says 3.2.
Also, you're fooling yourself if you don't think there are errors in paper books. I've seen many books with just plain wrong facts in them - Don't get me started on the Coriolis effect's magnitude or Walt Disney's corpse's temperature.
'if you had to have brain surgery would you prefer someone who has been through medical school, trained and researched in the field, or the student next to you who has read Wikipedia'?
Frankly, this quote makes me wonder how she got this job. Obviously I'd take the brain surgeon. But I also wouldnt accept brain surgery from someone who'd only read a book written by the brain surgeon. This is such nonsense. Honestly, I'm glad this woman isn't a lecturer of mine.
Also, I'm going to continue to use Wikipedia for my work. Take that, you stupid woman. Now YOU'RE causing the spread of misinformation: I can't cite it, so I'll have to write something else. Also, I'm going to make a donation to Wikipedia when I can, just to spite this.
And to top this off, the thing that annoys me most about this is that I didn't hear about this at university. I came home and read it on Slashdot. Way to prove yourself wrong, 'Professor' - looks like the Internet is a little better at spreading information than YOU.
Internet 1. Deakin 0.
I'd prefer neither of the two.
In a more supporting statement you could ask: "If you want to adjourn your knowledge on computer hardware would you prefer reading Wikipedia or have a $200/h professional trainer (to read you Wikipedia)?"
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
If you look up something technical on Wikipedia that doesn't cite its sources (or does cite its sources, but those sources themselves are from random places like someone's personal web page) then it's obvious that the information should be taken with the assumption that it likely is at least partially inaccurate.
One subject I have found on Wikipedia that is almost always correct is pop culture related stuff. Be it a video game, a TV show, whatever...those types of articles tend to have the most accurate information.
I think that Wikipedia should be used strictly for things like movies, music, etc. and there should be a separate Wikipedia set up that has a few requirements. Only professionals in the field can edit it, they have to cite sources such as peer reviewed journals or official documents...and if such sources do not exist yet because the topic is too new, they have to make a disclaimer stating as such.
I wouldn't use Wikipedia to do research for a paper, but I would certainly use it to find out who did the puppet work in Hellraiser II or some background on the development of a video game.
Living With a Nerd
First, you're mischaracterizing my statement. I didn't say 20% of the articles on Wikipedia are garbage. I said about 20% of the approximately 20 articles I have read; i.e. four articles contain significant errors or omissions. And now I add, for purposes of clarification, that since I lack the time and interest to do a comprehensive study of my own, I conclude on this admittedly insufficient sample that Wikipedia isn't good enough for me. If you prefer to take your chances, feel free, but if you claim Wikipedia is as good as a print source then you'll have to go into a bit of detail to refute the evidence of my own eyes.
Second, your assertion that errors are "generally restricted to ... articles so obscure or specific" makes it impossible to argue against you, because I can point to 20 articles containing errors and then you can dismiss them all because, in your exalted opinion, they're "obscure or specific" topics.
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
to have blind trust in someone just because they went to medical school as well! They are humans, they make mistakes. Mabye they didn't quite understand everything during their education. Would you in all situations have complete trust in yourself if you had gone to medical school? Or look to your own field. Do you have complete trust in all your collegues, just because they have the right education?
Swedish plasma phys. PhD student; MSc EE; knows maths, programming, electronics; finance interest; seeks opportunities
1, 2, 3, 4, I declare a revert war!
The students don't know how to do research; therefore, we need to teach them.
Or, more precisely put, there is a demand for a modern encyclopedia that actually has links to credible sources for its facts. By credible sources, we mean, people with some real expertise on the subject, not just some random dude.
This is my sig.
>And you could "s/Wikipedia/Encyclopedia Brittanica"
>on that statement and it would still be 100%
>accurate.
Yes. How is Wikipedia "breeding" unwitting trust? Humans everywhere have always had an inclination to believe what they are told by neighbors and friends.
Absolutely! Wikiality is exactly like newspapers in many ways
And completely different in others. It's the "others" that you don't bother to discuss that are the important question.
Newspapers have a powerful lobby and an agenda behind every news story. One that subtly uses semiotics and wordplay to manipulate emotion and how facts are perceived.
Wikipedians do exactly the same things.
And it's right here that the problem becomes obvious. Sure, _wikipedians_ might have an agenda, but it is absolutely not the case that the _wikipedia_ has one. It is precisely through the "collection of minds" that any sort of agenda gets scrubbed out. Through sheer mass, the collection tends toward the neutral.
It is this key difference that you fail to address, or even acknowledge. This thread a perfect example of why it's such an important difference: by simply posting this message the thread as a whole is moving towards the mean. The combination of our two viewpoints represents the "truth" much more than either one alone.
And that is the key difference. Traditional media simply has no correction system. You might have letters to the editor or some such, but they pick and choose what to print even in this case. Your opinion simply doesn't count.
So then the question becomes more obvious: can a collection of different opinions result in an accurate article? The vast majority of the slings and arrows that the Wikipedia takes from the outside is based on this complaint; that a collection of random inputs cannot possibly be as good as one focussed effort. Does this sound familiar to anyone? It should, it's precisely the same argument that pundits used to state, with authority, that Linux could never be a good operating system. Or that evolution cannot possibly work. Or that desktop publishing would destroy the world of print. Or many other things over the years.
But it's always wrong. The Wikipedia is a stochastic process, and the public simply does not understand these. Ask anyone where 100 random steps will get you and they'll always say "right back where you started". So obviously a billion years of random mutations couldn't possibly result in eyeballs, any more than a hundred random edits on the wikipedia could result in a good article. Of course the real answer is "square root of 100", or "the eyeball can evolve" or "the wikipedia does improve".
For all the talk of NPOV on every discussion page, it's little more than talk.
And so is this complaint. Just talk.
And then there's the much noted cabals. Political pages, religion pages, controversial authors, you name it - there's groups working every hour of every day to ensure the facts are as they see them.
Much noted, but largely unreal. Many people complain about this "problem", but examples are difficult to come by and in my experience are generally ancient history or outright terrible behavior on the part of the person complaining. If this problem did exist in as widespread a form as detractors claim, it would be noted far more widely than the small number of conspiracy sites that it's limited to.
And then theres the Wikipedia admins... the real problem with the site.
This is the third "real problem" in one message...
Some of them have been proven to be frauds, to have criminal convictions -- and yet they manipulate facts, they have their own little agendas, they block entire countries IP addresses, or the addresses of individuals they dislike (or who are protesting the nature of an article). "Vandalism" isn't necessary vandalism -- they've never actually defined that word. It's like "terrorism" is to a newspaper - a license to do what you like in the name of "truthiness". Would Galileo be a vandal, would Rosa Parks? Is Stephen Colbert?
*sigh* I'm an admin and never done any of these things. Oh, you mean "some" as in "one", or some equally vanishing number? Or do you mean "some"
There are lots of sites on the web with quality, professionally-sourced material.
One of the best things to happen on the Web in recent years is the emergence of peer-reviewed professional journals.
This potentially gives students access to vast amounts of high-quality, expert-verified information. They just need to be taught how to use it.
Serving your airship needs since 1995.
It might not be usable in scholarly articles, but for subjects where the material isn't subjective (such as an algorithm) it can just about replace my textbooks. I've stopped buying math and CS textbooks completely. For topics that are more open to debate, youre going to have to find many sources to get a good understanding anyway, and wikipedia is a great starting point.
Wikipedia, at least the version in portuguese, has very biased entries in regards to socio-political themes. For instance, the what it says about "marxismo" or "neo-liberalismo", etc. It is sad, as I guess most of the people who have the time and inclination to work on wikipedia (in Brazil) is left leaning (or left-radical, the type who is blind and aggressive to disagreement) and thus it distorts it completely, intelectually.
See, I could spend my time fixing a few of the entries, but frankly I don't want to make my life's role to be watching something being changed and changed back, especially when I know I am outnumbered. So instead of fixing the world (or fixing Wikipedia) I decided to... write a blog!
There are three good reasons to write blogs instead of contributing to Wikipedia: (a) not being anonymous, thus getting some recognition; (b) Being able to cut across subjects, making a text that can join, for instance, history, etymology and political commentary, all together; and (last but not least) (c) Present a coherent and crisp point of view on a theme, instead of a luke-warm, committee designed, reflection of the average text.
Personally I am happy with the path I took, since I can see how many people read everyday the definition (with an edge) that I give to certain topics. Particularly I am proud that overtime googled moved my blog to the first page of results to the query "o que é o poder?" ("What is Power", in portuguese) -- so I get my counterpoint to the wikipedia crowd.
As for knowing what to trust... I sincerely hope the "non-anonymous", "I stand for my ideas" and "I am a reputable thinker" model will prevail, or at least put in check, the Wikipedia faceless machine. As it has been for the past centuries, in the book business.
Quem a paca cara compra, paca cara pagará.
Wikipedia is an excellent research tool, and the professors are wrong to say otherwise - but you cannot cite it as a source, and a student would be foolish to do so. You can research a subject by entering it into Google, but you wouldn't cite the Google results page in a paper. Instead, you read what the results say, find out where they got their information from, and trace the facts back to an authority you can safely cite.
That's not research in the sense that it's being used here - ie, "original research." You're confusing "search" with "research".
When someone says "Wiki's not to be used for research", that's what they mean. Google actually can be a research tool (though a method of last resort), in that you can find a wide variety of raw, disparate information you can use for your own research.
Performing real research is the act of either producing your own results (like in a lab), or using a variety of primary sources as information to form your own ideas. Wiki would be bad for that.
Yes, regular encyclopedias can also be wrong. Yes, even 'authoritative' sources can be biased. The difference with Wikipedia is that some topics have actually been written by an author who is clearly no more than 10 or 12 years old who might have been writing a book report for school. And anything even slightly controversial can just end up in an editing war. So it is possible that you could read a popular misconception as fact. Don't get me wrong. I love Wikipedia. It tends to be the first place I go looking for information. And it can actually be a very well written introduction to any topic. But anything you read there needs to be verified from better sources before really accepting it as fact. I do think it has been noticeably improving over time however. I think it is much better than it was even a few years ago. Marking a topic as "controversial" and "citation needed" etc are all steps in the right direction.
Let me give an example. In 1995, a journalist named Richard Preston wrote a novel about the Ebola virus based on an article he wrote for The New Yorker. It was called The Hot Zone. It was a bestseller and I found it to be quite an exciting read. It is a superb example of what I like to think of as the fake documentary, a form of cheating as a way to make a work of fiction (or semi-fiction) have greater impact. The earliest story I am aware of that did this intentionally was Michael Chrichton's The Andromeda Strain (1969). In the preface and throughout that novel the story is presented to the reader as a retelling of fact. Some of his other novels like Jurassic Park also attempt this but mainly limit it to the preface. Chrichton is one of my favorite authors, and I do like the technique. An example of a film that attempts this was The Blair Witch Project. I thought that The Hot Zone took it a bit too far however by actually placing the book in the non-fiction section of bookstores and calling it "a true story" on the cover. So it is understandable that many people took the book as undisputed fact and not fiction or at least a sensationalist, misleading,(but exciting) piece of journalism.
After reading The Hot Zone a few times and finding it so exciting I decided to do a bit of internet research and general fact checking about it. I soon discovered that the book was considered laughable by most virologists and many of the doctors who were actually there. It was regarded as anything but an accurate portrayal of events. I did a bit more research and found out more specifically what Preston got wrong (a lot!). None of this information was particularly hard to find. So imagine my surprise some years later when I stumbled upon the Wikipedia entry for Ebola. It read like a gullible 10 year old's book report on the fictionalized version of the virus found in Preston's book. I was sufficiently annoyed with the sensationalist and poorly written misinformation that I spent the next 12 hours of my life changing it to be more representative of the truth and citing my references as well. I could never bear to go back to the topic later always assuming that whatever 10 year old wrote it would just go re-edit it and all of my research would have been in vain. So it was several years before I actually went back to look again. Well, most of my contributions were indeed gone, but they were replaced by pretty decent information. I couldn't really find fault with it. In fact it may have been better than what I had written.
So whenever there are very popular misconceptions about a topic Wikipedia tends to be highly unreliable, especially soon after the popular source of misinformation has been published. The Ebola entry seems to have been one of the more glaring examples (thanks to Preston), but it also showed that the self-correction dynamic of The Wiki can eventually fix things too. Wikipedia can be such a wonderful resource, giving you a perspective that just cannot be found anywhere else, but it has to be taken for what it is. It cannot be blindly trusted.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
Thing about newspapers is to realize that they're normally written extremely quickly to meet space requirements by an author not necessarily skilled in the topic. Then it goes through an editor who'll chop it down even more, again, without always realizing the importance of what they're chopping. Sometimes it can change meanings completely.
Still, I've become a bit jaded with all the mistakes I see in the paper. Stuff like '.9 caliber revolver', '10 12 gauge magazines' that were associated with a ruger 10-22, automatic revolver, Etc...
I don't read AC A human right
United States citizens have been breeding unwitting citizens for decades.
No sig for you!!
...that I think we can all live by:
Trust, but verify. [Wiki]
Now is Wikipedia perfect? Nope. I would like to see a separation between 'stable' and 'unstable' articles, I would also like to see the talk pages turned into a proper message board. I would also like to see the stupid habit of deleting good articles gone in the German Wikipedia. But none of those issues changes the fact that Wikipedia is among the very few information sources that actually outright tell you when there might be a controversy.
This all of course doesn't mean that Wikipedia can't be wrong, but then the Edit button and Talk pages are there for you to correct the matter *instantly*. No need to wait ten years till your library might get the revisited version of that paper encyclopedia.
Oh, and due to care to elaborate on which sources of information that you consider "good enough" for yourself?
I have to say that if you look at the edit summary of a random article for the text "revert vandalism", it's pretty clear what vandalism is-- typically things like people deleting the entire text of a section and substituting "E4T MY HAIRY WHONG" or "Ki11 ALL ". I don't think that Galileo would do something like that.
And why do you say "they've never actually defined that word [vandalism]"? Did you look up the definition of vandalism in Wikipedia?
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
I'm seeing a lot of digs at wiki's reliablity lately and even laura ingrams tossed in an anti-wiki comment on her show. Almost like the "powers that be" want to undercut it.
Fact is, Wiki is on par with Encyclopedia Brittanica in terms of accuracy.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
According to Wikipedia, this is just not true!
First, you're mischaracterizing my statement. I didn't say 20% of the articles on Wikipedia are garbage. I said about 20% of the approximately 20 articles I have read; i.e. four articles contain significant errors or omissions. And now I add, for purposes of clarification, that since I lack the time and interest to do a comprehensive study of my own, I conclude on this admittedly insufficient sample that Wikipedia isn't good enough for me. If you prefer to take your chances, feel free, but if you claim Wikipedia is as good as a print source then you'll have to go into a bit of detail to refute the evidence of my own eyes.
In my humble, anecdotal, undocumented personal experience, Wikipedia is vastly more useful to the average information-seeker than any print encyclopedia by an incredible margin. As to whether that renders it "as good as" such a source, well, I'll leave that up to the individual to decide. But I certainly don't read such print encyclopedias for spot-on accurate information down to the last detail.Second, your assertion that errors are "generally restricted to ... articles so obscure or specific" makes it impossible to argue against you, because I can point to 20 articles containing errors and then you can dismiss them all because, in your exalted opinion, they're "obscure or specific" topics.
By "obscure or specific" I intend to indicate that they are such articles as you would not find in a print encyclopedia anyway, or at least not in the same level of detail. God forbid you should find a minor error in two in the 17-page article on Lightsaber combat, or even the vastly more useful 15-page Kabbalah article complete with 37 citations and 31 credible sources. Of course you'll find a much more accurate, equally comprehensive source in the Encyclopedia Britannica, I'm sure.You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
What if you needed someone to configure a server, router, or firewall in an enterprise production environment? Would you want an IT professor or someone who has read wikipedia? My money's on a wikipedia reader. I'm a network security instructor myself, and only a handful of my peers I've worked with in academia have stepped foot in a data center in the last ten years.
Wikipedia shouldn't be treated as an expert source in a peer-reviewed journal, but it also shouldn't be dismissed as having no value for a researcher.
Yes, my only tool is a hammer. And you're starting to look like a nail.
ie, the undergrads I see to day are fully aware that wiki is 85% BS. They've also gone on to assume most other sources are 85% BS.
All's true that is mistrusted
This one always amazed me. That is, how poorly most Americans are at judging the character of an individual.
And people wonder how we elected such a stupid moron as President, and even more surprising, how could such a moron have ever fucked things up as much as he did.
Go do a search on the Internet for John McCain and his Vietnam record. There are guys, many of them are the same guys that people blindly believed regarding Kerry, who claim he made a deal with the Vietnamese to sell out America if only they'd let him go. They claim he's the manchurian candidate, and is still working for the communists to this day.
I wonder if McCain is going to have to put up with the same fucking bullshit regarding his military records? It didn't seem to come up in the primary campaign. Seems the party elders recognized that letting these Vietnam lunatics loose would be bad for them in the long run, so they kept 'em quiet.
unlike the 2004 convention, where they allowed the entire Republican party to basically spit on the memory of our nation's veterans, all in the name of getting John Kerry.
Bleah
But if there was no Wikipedia, how would anyone know what/where Deakin University is?
The problem is that before the advent of Wikipedia, kids were trained to accept the information in their school text books - or the lecture notes from their teachers...now there is an easier source, they accept that just as willingly.
My kid's high school science and math textbooks are APPALLINGLY bad - and getting fixes put into them is an almost impossible task that would take years even if it were possible at all. Wikipedia is FAR more reliable.
Wikipedia tells you not to trust it - it tells you to look at the source material from which the article was written - that's supposed to be flagged with those little blue numbers scattered through the text. These refer you back to the original sources where you CAN get the underlying "truth" (or at least peel back the next layer of the onion. This is no different than any other decently written academic book which lists sources in a bibliography at the end.
The core of the problem is that we have academic textbooks that students are supposed to accept...but how many times are students encouraged to actually check the references in the bibliography? NEVER! And that lack of distrust of secondary sources is the reason they don't check the references in Wikipedia either.
Wikipedia is here to stay - it IS the long term repository of all human knowledge and teachers need to come to terms with it and educate their pupils to use it correctly.
If you want to know the characteristics of a Pokemon - just read the Wikipedia article. If you are looking for knowledge about where to place the incision for the brain surgery you'll be conducting tomorrow - then follow the little blue numbers in square brackets and check the primary sources.
I hope the students can see through that lame analogy. The analogy isn't about Wikepedia. It's about whether you'd trust someone who has trained and worked in a field over someone how has merely read a few articles about the subject.
To paraphrase:
'if you had to have brain surgery would you prefer someone who has been through medical school, trained and researched in the field, or the student next to you who reads peer reviewed articles about neurosurgery from highly respected journals.
It doesn't make a heck of a lot of difference to me where the student gets his information. I want the surgeon!
I would prefer someone who went through medical school and completed his/her knowledge with the wikipedia's content and links than someone who just went through medical school.
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
This argument boils down to something like this: any source of information that may not be reliable is misleading and bad and makes people trust unreliable sources.
This means that anyone who has a political opinion, but is not an expert in politics, anyone who claims to be able to improve your frame rate in Quake who doesn't have a degree in something computer related that would apply, and grandma who claims to have the best tuna casserole recipe in the world, but has never gone to college for culinary arts and has written zero scholarly papers on it, are all contributing to misinformation and people trusting unreliable sources.
If a student of mine quoted Wikipedia, I would simply mark them down for using an unreliable resource for scholarly papers. When they came to argue, I'd argue back and explain exactly why you should not trust Wikipedia or any encyclopedia, without further research while writing stuff for anything more advanced than grade school. Then, they'd learn something. And it'd be much more productive then writing random stuff that gets posted on the internet and blames non-scholarly sources for being non-scholarly.
Unless you're doing the discovery yourself, nothing is "original research". Unless you verify the results yourself, it is just a matter of degree how far away you are from THE ORIGINAL source.
This is the fallacy of the whole anti-Wikipedia, anti-web. What is important is that the information is sourced back to its closest point possible.
If Wikipedia does a great job of anything, it is summarizing that information so that most people interested in the subject can find accurate (or relatively accurate) information that is sourced.
The pointy head crowd is pissed because their lies have been exposed. People don't have to go to the Ivory Towers anymore.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
I only use Wikipedia to get information on States and what not.
Just to point out a misunderstanding here, the articles on Wikipedia are copyrighted by those who write and edit them.
The problem with Wikipedia in this context is the confusion between information and knowledge. Wikipedia provides a lot of information. The question of knowledge, however, is more difficult.
Wikipedia claims to be "the sum of human knowledge", but it isn't. First of all, it's not a sum. The simple fact that stuff gets deleted means it is incomplete and wants to be incomplete. More importantly, Wikipedia doesn't provide knowledge, it provides information. Quality varies, truth value varies, completeness varies. The nature of Wikipedia means it always will. That doesn't mean that it can't be very good. But it does mean it is unreliable and needs to be checked. At the very least against its own edit history, better against other sources.
But the stated claim "the sum of human knowledge" doesn't tell you that. The painstaken listing of article count and the constant Wikipedia fans ranting that Wikipedia is better than Britannica, and that it's a revolution and bla bla also don't tell you to use with care.
If Wikipedia were a little more modest, a lot less arrogant and considerably more critical towards its own faults(*), it would be a lot more serious in the business sense.
(*) by that I don't mean to allow criticism, it does that. The problem is that most of the criticism falls into the "you can say what you want, but it doesn't change anything" category. There has been massive criticism of the deletionism attitude for years now, but deleted articles are still gone for good with no backup, instead of keeping at least the last version in archive, in case the consensus changes, for example. That way, criticism can be made, but it's pointless. What do you win if you get the notability nonsense abolished, for example? Millions of articles are already unrestorably gone, and the real work, that of bringing at least a part of them back, would only start after the success. That kind of not-allowing-criticism-to-have-a-meaning silences your critics not through force, but through frustration.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
As I say to my students 'if you had to have brain surgery would you prefer someone who has been through medical school, trained and researched in the field, or the student next to you who has read Wikipedia'?
This is an awful analogy, as one has nothing to do with another. What he trying to say is the information on wikipedia doesn't really give you extensive knowledge on a subject. Well, no kidding. Let me ask you this:
If I had to have brain surgery, would I prefer someone who went through medical school, or read a paper by a tenure doctor in field?
Clearly the doctor. Nothing will ever replace real experience or years of study, whether it is wikipedia or research documents, or the encyclopedia, or anything.
Wikipedia is a reference. A starting point to find out about a topic, not the end all, be all source of information. Just like any other collection of general knowledge.
Furthermore... yet experience has shown it can be wrong, incomplete, biased, or misleading
This is true for many ACCURATE sources of information across subjects. It is hard to find a truly unbiased (or misleading / no alternate agenda) history book, interpretation of literature, or explanation of just about anything non-science related. Just because it is biased or misleading doesn't make it something that shouldn't be read or taken into consideration.
Personally, it sounds like the prof is missing the point of wikipedia.
-Mark
Dovie'andi se tovya sagain.
The reality is students are lazy and the majority do the minimum to pass. Simply increasing the minimum standard and giving students the resources they need improves all the students who are just cruising through. Of course this is only if they have no alternative!
I think that more then anything else, this points to the research paper as being an outmoded form of academic assessment at the undergraduate level. The idea that there is a "credible authority" to sight is problematic. It is an elitist view, that privileges the written work of those with access to formal education, copious amounts of composition time, access to editors, peer review boards, corporate research grants, etc. over people with first hand experience, which is clearly more valuable in a post-industrial information-centric era. It may be a bit of an exaggeration to say that a peer reviewed journal is just a very inefficient wiki, but it makes the point.
Most undergraduates would be better served by class assignments that discount the credibility of information and emphasize the effective use of information. Bad research should be evident because it cannot be used effectively to accomplish an end, rather then because it cannot be traced back to a stuffy white guy in a tweed suit whose other hobby is adding letters to the end of his name.
In my mind, I still have difficulty separating Wikipedia and an old Saturday Night Live skit: The "Common Knowledge" game show, hosted by Steve Martin. Common knowledge seems to me to be the very most fundamental definition of the data at Wikipedia.
One thing to add: And then there's the much noted cabals. Political pages, religion pages, controversial authors, you name it - there's groups working every hour of every day to ensure the facts are as they see them. This problem is bigger than that. Interest groups, especially those tied to a political or commercial entity, are even worse than those with an ideology to grind. They can pay for 24/7 surveilance of their articles. They can have an entire staff on hand just to make sure that no Wikipedia article speaks ill about them.
They will almost always be more and more dedicated than neutral, objective writers whose main passion is the promotion of truth. And they will almost always be a lot more focussed and intentional.
With a newspaper, I at least (if I care a little) know its agenda and ideology. On Wikipedia, every article can have a totally different one, even the same article can have a different one between today and tomorrow, and finding out about it can be next to impossible.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Wikipedia taught me to question every single authority I ever trusted and deeply investigate the phenomenon of trust. I learned more about questioning sources and credibility than I could've learned in any other setting I'd previously been in.
Whenever I hear someone say things like this, they always turn out to be an authority that wants to be trusted without question.
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
I can say everything that this guys says about Wikipedia just as eaily about profs. So, the liberals profs and vast-brain-heads are being disintermediated and their value is going down? Better watch out or they will become conservatives. They need a new business model maybe (i crack me up)
Oh horrors. Wikipedia might not be 100% accurate? Shiver me timbers.
... but never in just one place.
Next you will tell me that the Easter Bunny didn't hide those eggs in my back yard.
Wikipedia is a great place to get quick information. It is broad, dynamic, and constantly evolving. But I would no more blindly trust its contents than I would the Huffington Post or MSNBC. When confronted with a new topic I will frequently hit Wikipedia in order to quickly find some basic background that will introduce me to the issues and vocabulary that surround the topic. But where I came from you NEVER rely on ANY single source for facts.
Every author has bias, and the mere act of authoring a piece introduces that bias. Even if only through the choice of what data to include and what to pass over. An honest author will generally indicate areas of contention or uncertainty. We as consumers, however, should rely on neither the honesty nor the informedness of any given author. It is, therefore, the responsibility of the consumer to analyze the offering with a critical eye and to seek out addtional contrasting sources before forming a lasting opinion. The truth is out there
The provenance of knowledge from any source is never certain, even if you think it is. I have, on numerous occasions, observed college professors being worse sources of information than wikipedia. (I've intentionally asked them questions which I knew the answers to both from Wikipedia reading, and more 'acceptable' research)
The entire point of this whole "enlightenment" business that we started a few hundred years ago was to recognize that there are no "acceptable experts" other than fully supported, immediately accessible arguments. You should believe anything that you aren't entirely forced to.
I would trust a Wiki researcher to operate on my brain. Is that a sign that I NEED brain surgery?
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
Well... except you may need to dig an awful lot. Archiving, splitting to new article, deleting (page history including talk page deleted), discussion on a given topic on some random policy page, or noticeboard, or project page, or village pump, or user talk pages, or any of the above but split off to a subpage, possibly deleted.
It can be like an archaeological dig trying to analyse things after the fact. Indeed just look at Arbcom cases (what a lovely newspeak word eh?)
Wikipedia is a grand experiment that is descending into disorder and highlighting people's worst aspects. It's also contributing to today's general problems of an erosion of truth, authority, privacy, intelligence, etc. Wikipedia is a dream for the kind of people we have running Western governments at present.
It's all rather ironic, considering the grand ambitions of Wikipedia and it's idea of empowering people with information.
-- *~()____) This message will self-destruct in 5 seconds...
I would just like to say .... (citation needed) where is this guys proof? Ohhhh wait, He isn't against wikipedia's reliability to give proven facts at all. He just isnt comfortable that people arent listening to authority for authorities sake. Well sorry you're going to have to do better than that. Come back when you can fill wikipedias minimum requirements that you bemoan so.
When reading newspaper, you have no way to see the opinions of anybody other than the members of the editorial board of the newspaper.
I'm not sure what that means.
If you're reading anything other than reporting in a newspaper, I'd suggest you consider reading a better newspaper. In newspapers, opinions are found on the editorial pages, in the letters to the editor section, or in articles written by the columnists.
Newspapers are a bit funny in that respect, but they typically have this thing about keeping opinions and reporting separate, allowing the reader to distinguish and choose between them.
Unless, of course, opinions are what you're looking for. In that case, I'd suggest something like TV news programming where it's not unusual to find a mixture of reporting and editorialising mixed in together and presented against a musical score for dramatic effect, with some friendly banter between co-anchors interjecting the requisite nods of approval or frowns of disproval so their viewers can know what to think, or at least not worry about the complexity or the significance of the story.
Even better, go the personal pundit route. All opinions all the time. Much more entertaining with the added benefit of no ink smudges on your fingers.
As I say to my students 'if you had to have brain surgery would you prefer someone who has been through medical school, trained and researched in the field, or the student next to you who has read Wikipedia'?
Would you like to have someone operate on your brain based on his own opinion of what is wrong, or on many brain surgeons all over the world opinions of what is wrong? That would be a better analogy. Just because an article can be edited by someone next to you doesn't mean that articles aren't edited by experts in the field as well. 100%, know your sources, verify accuracy, do real research.
People are unwittingly trusting the information they find on Wikipedia, yet experience has shown it can be wrong, incomplete, biased, or misleading
And these so called experts can found to be wrong, misleading, biased, and incomplete as well. Sounds like Sharman Lichtenstein is being biased and misleading himself.
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How dare you imply Wikipedia might be biased!
There are reasons why democracy does not work nearly as well as capitalism.
-- David D. Friedman
The other day I was able to correct some received wisdom on Wikepedia. (Origin of placenames.) It will still be being quoted wrongly from the shelves of libraries in decades time but Wikipedia will be right. Just about any book on English placenames before 1968 is tosh but that doesn't stop people quoting them. I suppose I could have written a paper of 100 words which might have been published in the back of some obscure journal after the spelling was checked but that's not a very successful way of disseminating knowledge. So to the original lecturer I say : "Wikipedia is there to be improved, that's what it's there for, that's what it does. It is received wisdom which may be flawed or may be spot on - ANY single source is just as suspect."
At least the people who read Wikipedia can read. Unlike 25% of high school grads. If Wikipedia is a failure, then our school system is truly broken.
Evaluating accuracy of information and its associated (even estimated) margin of error is fundamental to functioning in any information-rich society, so why aren't we teaching these concepts in kindergarten? Any group or country that doesn't teach this to all of its members (or citizens, or citizens-in-training) is going to continue to lag further and further behind others that do. Key to this is to start with the understanding that no information is 100% accurate, and conversely no information is 100% inaccurate; there's always more to every story or situation, and what has to be learned is to decide when you have approximately enough confidence in the information you do have, and that you have approximately enough information, to act. It just seems to me that we need to be teaching this with arithmetic and spelling; it's just as important to functioning in our society.
The Wikipedia\Google\Gutenberg Project learning "stack" allows me to process information in a manner orders of magnitude more efficiently than bookreading. I no longer feel guilty about not reading paper books because they are seriously obsolete.
Back in the early 1980s I was a baseball stats guy. As the only kid on the block with Street and Smith's annual preview I was at a huge advantage. Ten years later, with Bill James and rotisserie leagues, everyone was a stats guy. My monopoly was broken.
Same with trivia: prior to Trivial Pursuit, Bar Trivia games, and Jeopardy I was pretty good at trivia; ten years later *everyone* is good at trivia. Again, broken monopoly.
For centuries academia had a monopoly on information. Wikipedia helps break that monopoly, and it is no wonder the academic community has such antipathy toward it.
It's not what I have learned at Wikipedia over the past few years that amazes me; it's the knowledge that academics *know better* than the careerist pap they spew that really freaks me out.
So let the academics and the television watchers say what they will about Wikipedia. I for one will count my lucky stars that I have at my fingertips access to an unprecedented wealth of information.
assign his grad students to it, whatever. As if nothing else in our media environment fosters "unwitting trust"
skepticism is all well and good, but sometimes you have to make choices with imperfect knowledge. Oh wait, that not SOMEtimes, that 100% of the time.
People are continuously force fed ridiculous commercial claims and para science and when something interesting emerges from the shallowness of media it is a thing to be afraid of and not to trust. Weird.
When Wikipedia has been vetted by credible institutions as more accurate (at least outside pop-culture) then the "credible expert" Encylopedia Britannica, the trust may be unwitting but is it really unfounded.
Well if you are talking about the study in Nature. It's a single study of a small portion of articles comprising a segment of topics. Which had at least a few number of criticisms of it's methodology which makes it interesting but hardly authoritative enough to support your statement.
If you have other studies you should link to them.
Honestly, I find that individual experts make far more mistakes that Wiki, which is to a good degree peer reviewed.
Well...that's a load. Short criticism: "experts" here is poorly defined. There's no reason to believe that your sample of either group is going to be anything close to representative. Peer review is the idea that it's scrutinized by a large group of people who *ARE* experts. Since you can't tell people who are experts from those who are not on the Wiki. There's no way to validate that claim of yours either.
At least Wiki lets you go into the history and see all the editors, everythign else they've edited, what the differing opinions were, and a discussion on the topic at hand. I can't do that with my encylopedia.
Which is unclear if that's actually a good thing for the stated purposes or not. For example seeing lots of opinions - no matter how uninformed - could dilute the confidence in the well informed opinion.
A "Deakin University associate professor of information systems" wants to whine about "credible experts"? That's rich. -Carl
Let's review the levels of evidence based practice - it's an important, new concept that is used in medical fields (taken from http://www.cebm.net/index.aspx?o=1025 Center for Evidence-Based Medicine) 1 = best quality 5 = worst quality
1a: Systematic reviews (with homogeneity ) of randomized controlled trials
1a-: Systematic review of randomized trials displaying worrisome heterogeneity
1b: Individual randomized controlled trials (with narrow confidence interval)
1b-: Individual randomized controlled trials (with a wide confidence interval)
1c: All or none randomized controlled trials
2a: Systematic reviews (with homogeneity) of cohort studies
2a-: Systematic reviews of cohort studies displaying worrisome heterogeneity
2b: Individual cohort study or low quality randomized controlled trials (80% follow-up)
2b-: Individual cohort study or low quality randomized controlled trials (80% follow-up / wide
confidence interval)
2c: 'Outcomes' Research; ecological studies
3a: Systematic review (with homogeneity) of case-control studies
3a-: Systematic review of case-control studies with worrisome heterogeneity
3b: Individual case-control study
4: Case-series (and poor quality cohort and case-control studies)
5: Expert opinion without explicit critical appraisal, or based on physiology, bench research or 'first principles'
Sharman Lichtenstein needs to rethink her question. Would you rather have an "expert" do the medical operation or would you rather have the most effective techniques that have been affirmed by evidence-based practice guide the practitioner during the operation?
The bottom line is, learning from expert opinion is just as effective (or if you want to be pessimistic, unhelpful) as learning anything from Wikipedia. As long as Wikipedia uses credible sources when a user makes an article, I don't see how Wikipedia's credibility is diminished. I feel that Wikipedia is a good place to find general information. From the Wikipedia article you find more references, and through those references an individual will likely find what he or she is looking for. If Wikipedia wants to improve its image perhaps it should require users to provide more references when writing articles, and also provide a scale like the one posted in this message, which indicates the relative strength of the reference cited in the article. But hey, I guess that would be common sense.
But the error rate has been shown to be lower than traditional encyclopedias, so if those are acceptable than Wikipedia must be as well.
I agree about the closed mindness of the Ivory Tower mind.
One of the best surgeons of our time was barely recognized.
From wikipedia:
Vivien Theodore Thomas (August 29, 1910 - November 26, 1985) was an African-American surgical technician who helped develop the procedures used to treat blue baby syndrome in the 1940s. He was an assistant to Alfred Blalock at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee and later at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. Without any education past high school, Thomas rose above poverty and racism to become a cardiac surgery pioneer and a teacher to many of the country's most prominent surgeons. Thomas was born close to Lake Providence, Louisiana. The son of a carpenter, he attended Pearl High School (now known as Martin Luther King Magnet High School for Health Science and Engineering) in Nashville, Tennessee, in the 1920s. Even though it was part of a racially segregated system, the school provided him with a high-quality education. Later, when Thomas' savings were wiped out, he abandoned entirely his plans for college and medical school, relieved to have even a low-salary job as the Great Depression deepened.
Thomas showed an extraordinary aptitude for surgery and precise experimentation, which led Blalock to grant him more freedom in the execution of the procedures. Tutored in anatomy and physiology by Blalock and his young research fellow (Dr. Joseph Beard), Thomas rapidly mastered complex surgical techniques and research methodology. He and Blalock developed great respect for one another, forging such a close working relationship that they came to operate almost as a single mind. Outside the lab environment, however, they maintained the social distance dictated by the norms of the times. In an era when institutional racism was the norm, Thomas was classified, and paid, as a janitor, despite the fact that by the mid 1930s he was doing the work of a postdoctoral researcher in Blalock's lab.
> "As I say to my students 'if you had to have
> brain surgery would you prefer someone who has
> been through medical school, trained and
> researched in the field, or the student next
> to you who has read Wikipedia'?" So says Deakin
> University associate professor of information
> systems, Sharman Lichtenstein, who believes
> Wikipedia, where anyone can edit a page entry,
> is fostering a climate of blind trust among
> people seeking information
As I say to my students "Question Authority", and trust in data. Lichtenstein relies on his position as IT professor to give his opinion credence (the logical fallacy 'Appeal to Authority'). Would you rather trust what someone, even a college professor in that field "believes" despite the fact that "experience has shown it can be wrong, incomplete, biased, or misleading", or in data objectively collected in order to test the hypothesis? In absence of the latter, one should examine the "opinion" with skepticism. Lack of data is not a reason to accept an expert opinion, rather it's a reason not to.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Unlike professors, who are never wrong, always give complete answers, are totally without bias and never mislead.
Seriously, what source of information isn't sometimes wrong, incomplete, biased, or misleading?
-- Should you believe authority without question?
I'll very likely take the medical school person, but get this: I don't know jack shit about medical school. I don't have any direct knowledge that accredited doctors are more competent than unaccredited doctors; my trust is blind. Lichtenstein, your knife cuts two ways.
That's not a put-down against medical schools. It's just an acknowledgment that the statement "medical-school doctors are well trained" is dogma. It may even be true dogma (indeed, my opinion (and probably majority opinion) is that the statement is generally true, which means that it's also successful dogma).
There are only so many hours in the day, and I can't learn everything so I end up trusting some parties that appear to be authorities. I can't "be a scientist" about everything; life's too short. Um, especially with all those doctors treating our illnesses with leeches or experimental new drugs. ;-)
But where do oldschool encyclopedia editors fit in? Is their authority (and I really mean authority, not competence -- I'm not questioning anyone's competence or knowledge in this post) as strong as medical school graduates' authority? No. At least you meet your surgeon, and he at least has some sort of "social proof" that he went through The Shit That Is Medical School, even if it's just that he's surrounded by a staff that says "yes, doctor" when he gives an order. I don't have any idea who wrote or edited an oldschool encyclopedia entry and what else they've worked on, and finding out the answer to that, is more than one click away. Compare that to Wikipedia.
Wikipedia, regardless of whether it's more or less accurate than oldschool (remember, as I said above, accuracy and competence are not what I'm talking about here), has more dogmatic authority than an oldschool encyclopedia, precisely because the trust is less blind. (I must keep stressing, I'm talking about blind-vs-informed; I'm not talking about how well that trust is actually warranted.) When I can click to see what else the author has written -- when I know that it's that transparent and auditable -- its authority becomes more legitimate.
Heh. Again, Lichtenstein, your knife cuts two ways. You see, ultimately, trusting authority is what "scholarly" (as opposed to first-hand) research is. That's what "recognized credentials" means, as much as you try to sugar-coat it. Recognized how? Questioning Wikipedia's authority just raises the same question about everyone else's.As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Has it ever occurred to you that they might delete entries from talk pages, including the talk page's history? No? You don't know Wikipedia.
Professor Lichtenstein is a very smart man.
I understand that his next paper will reveal the shocking truth about Luke Skywalker's familial relationship to Darth Vader.
huh ? what kind of hilarity of an example was that ?
wikipedia is a source information that explicitly states when a piece of information on a subject is controversial and open to debate. you cant go further from there.
additionally, if it boiled down to the stupid example that guy gave, i would rather have someone who read wikipedia articles which are contributed and edited by millions rather than an article which is produced just with the experience, capability and all the biases a single academician or a group of academicians produced.
reproducing shitty 'research' papers by copying each other with 'et al's and extreme conservatism were two of the biggest stumbling blocks in the propagation of information up to these times of internet. now we have come over those, but fossils are seeking to bring back the good ol' days when nobody else but the personas which academic establishment approves could have a say in anything to be learned.
those days are gone. we are living in a new age.
Read radical news here
If we wanted to be sure about information we are "trusting" we would only trust double blind studies that have been peer reviewed and replicated. It would be wrong for a student to write a paper only quoting Wikipedia. However a good paper with multiple sources and a robust list of ref'd papers, etc (Bibliog.) would help to some degree.
Allowing quotes from information within wikipedia that has a proper citation would also be a good advance.
However, not to allow quoting from Wikipedia esp. from graduate students is an affront to academic freedom.
http://www.hawknest.com/
It's just an encyclopedia, why do people expect it to be the fount of all knowledge? As I have already seen written here, it is a good starting point but not a source in and of itself.
As for "anyone can edit it" that is only partly true and most of the longer pages have several citations going off onto everything from magazines to blogs to scholarly papers. The information on Wikipedia IS usually creditable and if you doubt it then you can look for it somewhere else.
But there is another aspect of Wikipedia that naysayers often miss. It has pages about stuff you would never see in an encyclopedia because its not "important". Not something you would base a report on, but for example, when researching about a foreign country you can look up pages written (mostly) by natives about their own country, city and even flyspeck village that wouldnt even be a blip anywhere else.
...then you fail," where F 49 That's what I told undergraduates in my lectures. "If you plagerize wikipedia then you fail," where F = 0. Google the odd sentence or paragraph or two in a research paper and up pops wikipedia all higlighted in the search colours of google's cache; then hit alt+PrtSc - makes for great proof that the student is a lazy stupid cheat for the dean. I will not be responsible for producing a generation of lazy stupid idiots - though I am afraid we will lose this battle.
Obviously this IT professor does not believe in the wisdom of crowds. Wikipedia is still in its infancy, and has a ways to go before its entries merit citation; however, discouraging students from using it hampers progress. Wikipedia should be used as a starting point, as posted earlier, and the citations provided on the relevant page should lead the researcher in a more factual direction. Just because we cannot verify the integrity of the writer does not mean that the post is erroneous. I can guarantee you that more Phd's have posted on Wikipedia than those that write entries in Brittanica's encyclopedia (bring on the fire). In addition Wikipedia caters to the long tail of information, there is no limit to how many entries it can have and it already surpasses mainstream encyclopedias by the thousands. I encourage students to use Wikipedia as a starting point, build their knowledge base further elsewhere, and foster progress by posting and citing your findings. I agree that using it as a sole source for credible information is imprudent. This professor's emphasis on Wikipedia's misuse is hampering the progress of what may soon be the most complete informative resource available. Cheers to you tyrant professor, use your position of power to prevent progress. Maybe an entry for Professor Lichtenstein is in order?
At least with newspapers you can usually assume the authors aren't deliberately writing things that are factually false.
My math professor at Carnegie Mellon said that some of the PHD students like to change obscure formulas on wikipedia and then check back to see how long it takes before the formulas are corrected (if they ever are). By way of explanation, he said "when you spend a lot of time in math departments you meet some interesting characters".
Only Wikipedia would have a gigantic article on how it was subject to academic fraud.
Of course! By contrast, information disseminated from those fonts of truthiness, i.e. professors and other experts, are never wrong, incomplete, biased, or misleading.
Bullshit? Yes, obviously.
No individual nor a collective of them will ever be perfectly-accurate; therefore, we are talking about error rates here. And to that end, there was a study a couple years ago published in Wired indicating that Wikipedia a rate of factual inaccuracy similar to that of Encyclopedia Britannica.
Now, Britannica is not great by encyclopedia standards -- World Book is reputed to be better. But given its tendency to be referenced in schools, and given the dogmatic criticism heaped upon Wikipedia by those people who have a vested interest in maintaining barriers-to-entry to valuable knowledge -- i.e., professors and other so-called "experts", and given the borderline anarchistic model of page-maintenance used on Wikipedia, this is is nonetheless quite an achievement.
I will add that I would guess the factual accuracy on Wikipedia varies more-widely as one departs the realm of the provable. That is, bias is unlikely in fields of low controversy: math and hard science, possibly excluding biology. But it is much more likely where the flames of emotions and passions are fanned, e.g. particularly on topics of political controversy...
I will also add that I tend to trust professors and experts before I trust unknown, i.e. random-to-me people on the Internet. But not by a wide margin: I still think Wikipedia is a powerful aid, and, where such an expert presents a statement that contradicts the content of Wikipedia, that expert ought to be challenged to defend their statement in light of Wikipedia's content -- provided the content is not in a state of dispute at the time of reading... (Wikipedia and similar sources have been useful to me in recent years in shooting-down claims made by an "eastern" doctor (read: witch-doctor, allegedly an "expert" on the field of medicine for which I saw her) and those of a MLM-peddler from Quixtar.)
Is Capitalism Good for the Poor?
She recently got her PhD and started teaching a large (~200 students) year long sequence of courses in general biology. She, as many academics do, insists that wikipedia shouldn't be used as a source of information mainly because it's unreliable.
Over the past year she's spread more misinformation and misguided more people than any wikipedia article, mainly because of "blind trust" on the part of the students. When she doesn't know the answer to a question, she puts on her thoughtful face and just makes something up or takes a guess to maintain her appearance as an expert.
Not everyone eats the BS. She's been corrected a couple of times by students that could cite reliable sources for their own information and she doesn't take it gracefully.
Wikipedia brings many issues to the forefront that are latent in other sources.
The two biggest are:
1. Since you can't assume the author has any particular expertise, citations are extra important, where many "real" works you'd find in the library are often a bit hand-wavy about things.
2. When there are multiple viewpoints, if the subject is at least vaguely non-obscure, people holding all the viewpoints will tend to show up on at Wikipedia article, and there will be arguments trying to hash out some article that neutrally summarizes all the major viewpoints. With a "real" book, authors (even well-credentialed ones) will often give short shrift to other major viewpoints in the field, either summarizing them uncharitably, or even not acknowledging their existence.
If anything, I think Real Nonfiction Authors could do with a bit of the discipline that the better parts of Wikipedia enforce, when it comes to citing their sources and acknowledging and neutrally summarizing competing views.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I don't think it is that simple. I believe that the dumbing down of all material has begun from the first year of school. There is a horrible flow on effect from there. It is the curriculum that is at fault. The public schools need to stop focusing the content towards the lower end of the bell curve to at least the middle section.
.
'if you had to have brain surgery would you prefer someone who has been through medical school, trained and researched in the field, or the student next to you who has read Wikipedia'?
What if I told you that the surgeon learned about brain surgery from Wikipedia? Surprised? I'm not. I'm in medical school and Wikipedia has helped me finish at least half of my education so far.
Nonsense! This can even been seen to be so in an active thread that has even something as low as a dozen participants. What happens is that people stop to read post and start to skim them. Then after some time, they just stop reading certain people's which gets worse as time goes on. Then there's the people that come into the conversation "late" which exceedingly rarely read what has been posted before they post; they typically just read the last couple and then jump in.
Basically, what you have in an "everyone can speak up" newspaper/etc is nothing being said because any one person is drown out from the crowd. There'll be a disturbing signal to noise ratio. It's a kind of, the power of the internet is that everyone has a voice, but the weakness of the internet is that everyone has a voice.
I've been around since pre-popular internet and what I've seen in is the crackpots getting a voice, people trust what they read, and those crackpots create new crackpots downward spiral. Things were MUCH better when people listened to the experts instead of denying what they say and cherry picking there data (and getting away with it because there are so many of them agreeing with each other).
But, then again, you are using this cherry picking nonsense in this post. Don't want to read/listen to bad non-journalism? Don't. Switch on to something else. Yes, it does exist. In the US, when I lived there, the PBS channels had news programs that were fairly decent. In Canada there is CBC: Sunday and in the UK there is the BBC or the Independent. If you're in Germany, you could pretty much pick one (Spiegel has an on-line English version http://www.spiegel.de/international/).
"As I say to my students 'if you had to have brain surgery would you prefer someone who has been through medical school, trained and researched in the field, or the student next to you who has read Wikipedia'?" So says Deakin University associate professor of information systems, Sharman Lichtenstein.
... Sharman ... What a nice argument. Maybe you don't understand the concept of an argument. Here, take a look at this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument
So
IF ONLY my doctor looked at Wikipedia before he prescribed me a drug, instead of relying on marketing material from the pharmaceutical company; then he would have also perhaps taken a moment to read the links to the reports from respected medical journals within the Wikipedia article, thus realising that the use of that drug in the treatment of my ailment had been banned by the FDA ten years ago in the US, only to be continually marketed by the company for the banned purpose in Australia.
The real problem with Wikipedia applies equally to all reference sources: if you take something at face value without reading it, then you will be easily misled. This problem applies not only to kids, parents and teachers, but even to the veritable reporters for publications such as UK Newpspapers The Guardian and The Independent.
When a Wikipedia article falsely claims that comedian Sacha Baron Cohen used to work for investment bank Goldman Sachs; and these publications (shortly after and with scarily similar wording) make the same claim; it only follows that well-meaning Wiki-geeks will eventually use the respected publications as references for the original source of the information. It is now down to the rest of the world to prove that Sacha Baron Cohen DID NOT work for Goldman Sachs. In fact, the originator of the lie himself probably cannot be sure that he was not inadvertently telling the truth.
We can take it for granted that Netiots (internet idiots, for those who have not met one) will continue to make scandalous entries about funny and usually unbelievable things. But the non-Americans amongst us (see: http://youtube.com/watch?v=VdljzbHELmM ) are generally aware that Pope Benedict XVI did not really play the un-masked Darth Vader inThe Empire Strikes Back, and that the great wall of China was not built by the Emperor Nasi-Goreng to keep the rabbits out (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DvlWQyvEI38). But it is not the Netiots we have to worry about, no.
The real Wiki-vandals are the companies, governments and lobby groups of all sorts that flood Wikipedia with their squeaky clean corporate profiles (yes, corporate governments), whipped straight from their websites (read http://www.cinemablend.com/technology/Corporations-Get-Caught-Getting-Wiki-With-It-5903.html , and an example of what they are talking about http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pfizer). These entities are the true threat to the laudable goal of Wikipedia to provide a freely accessible forum for the production and storage of (hopefully well-referenced) articles for the masses â" a forum that does not restrict the privilege of contribution to those that have jumped through the all the right hoops.
And so you see. The printed word is no more reliable than the plasma. Lies may be propagated on Wikipedia, but not without debate. Politicians spouting their sludge find their propaganda sitting side-by-side with those that mock them (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e5jtiJPlv4Y look at the related videos), being watched by people who would never have dreamed of watching Youtube until they heard the evening news promoting the online presence of the said politician.
If knowing that anything in a Wikipedia article is as likely to be crap as correct, the average reader becomes more vigilant in clicking through to the supporting sources; then Wikipedia has served the purpose of bringing to the masses the healthy skepticism that is, after all, the cornerstone of all academic pursuits.
Dark eyes look down from ivory towers. Do they cheer or do they fear?