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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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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.
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.
See, I use Yahoo Answers as a barometer for ignorance. I check it once every so often to see if the human race is still, collectively, an arse-scratching bunch of chimps.
So far, Yes.
Last week on yahoo answers:
Cud I B prgnent?
Did u do it standing up???
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 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.
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.
*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.
"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.