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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.
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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
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.
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 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
...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.
"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.
I have a lot of opinions about Cyborgs and Architects
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I noticed that it has a lot to do with the culture of the educational institute.
:P
My high school put high priority on sources, some times up to 20% of total marks. Poor sourcing or incorrect sourcing was equated to the likes of cheating resulting in various repercussions of real world importance. Anyone daring to be as lazy as you example would fail that specific course. Though to balance this aspect researching methods was a small section of every semester in every class as well as critical thinking.
Yet when I got to university there was simply no emphasis on sourcing, we were shown Google and then yelled at about how Wikipedia was the devil and told to get busy. When I started handing in my sources like I would in highschool it didn't take long to realise that they rarely even looked at them, and _never_ checked the sources for themselves. Guess what happened next! I simply started Googling, sighting anything but Wikipedia, and grabbing random pages from text books that sounded remotely on topic.
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 ate your fish.
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
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.
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