Wikipedia and the New Curriculum
Digital Literacy Is Knowing How We Store What We Know
SOURCE: Wikipedia
Students and teachers alike must understand how systems of knowledge creation and archivization are changing. Encyclopedias are no longer static collections of facts and figures; they are living entities. Just check the entry on Global Warming.
Whenever I read an article about an educational institution “banning” Wikipedia I make a point to add this school to a list for future reference. This list serves two purposes: it gives me a list of schools at which I am not likely to work anytime soon (I am a professor of Emerging Media), and it gives me a list of educational institutions which I advise students to avoid. I could make the soft claim that this banning is just a silly policy, a “stick your head in the sand” approach to learning in a networked digital era, but instead I want to make a more controversial claim: It is irresponsible for educational institutions not to teach new knowledge technologies such as Wikipedia. I should probably admit upfront that I am not a scientist by training; my scholarship grows out of literary studies and a concern for how literacy changes in the age of the digital. Wikipedia, or more generally the networked archival structure it represents, alters the way in which we create, share, and record knowledge, and thus has rather significant effects on how we approach education across all disciplines, and specifically in technology and science. Students and teachers alike must understand how systems of knowledge creation and archivization are changing. Encyclopedias are no longer static collections of facts and figures; they are living entities, and the new software changes the rules of expertise.
No longer is an encyclopedia a static collection of facts and figures…it is an organic entity.
Although Wikipedia was certainly in the public discourse for quite some time—Wired featured Wikipedia in March of 2005—it was the Seigenthaler controversy which brought the encyclopedia “anyone can edit” to the forefront of public consciousness. In May of 2005, as a hoax, an individual edited John Seigenthaler’s Wikipedia entry so that it read that for a short time Seigenthaler, who was the Assistant Attorney General under the Kennedy administration, had been implicated in the assassinations of both John and Robert Kennedy, a patently false claim. In September of that year, a friend of Seigenthaler discovered the error and reported it to Seigenthaler, which led to a public debate between him and Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia. This incident seemed to prove what many had feared: that this new encyclopedia was a cesspool of misinformation, not to be trusted. In the words of a Britannica editor, Wikipedia is like the public restroom; one never knows who used it last.
Not surprisingly, much of the ensuing debate around Wikipedia centered on its level of accuracy, and several studies were initiated to compare Wikipedia to other sources such as Britannica. In many of these studies, Wikipedia fared equally as well as its competitors, with the added advantage of being able to correct its own errors and relish the fact that others could not do the same. Unfortunately, this debate obfuscated a more important aspect of this event.
Seigenthaler and his colleagues are, I assume, a relatively educated group of individuals. Seigenthaler is a lawyer and a journalist, obviously a man who is gifted with words, and comfortable writing. However, rather than edit the Wikipedia entry himself, he emailed others about it. The entry was not changed until, after some time, another colleague of Seigenthaler decided to edit the biography. Why did it take so long after the error was discovered for someone to change it? I am not trying to play blame the victim here; I am merely pointing out that what seems like the easiest and most obvious initial response was not so with respect to the 78-year-old Seigenthaler.
And this is why digital literacy is so crucial for educational institutions: we do a fundamental disservice to our students if we continue to propagate old methods of knowledge creation and archivization without also teaching them how these structures are changing, and, more importantly, how they will relate to knowledge creation and dissemination in a fundamentally different way. No longer is an encyclopedia a static collection of facts and figures (although some of its features might be relatively so); it is an organic entity. To educational and policy institutions which, for a substantial portion of history, have maintained control over static codex centered archives—think not only academic libraries, but national ones as well—the shift to an organic structure which they no longer control or solely influence represents a crisis indeed. But to train students in old literacy seems to me to be fundamentally the wrong approach. As Howard Rheingold suggests in Smart Mobs, in the future individuals will be divided between “those who know how to use new media to band together [and] those who don’t.”
Not only does Wikipedia contain the “hard science,” but it also records and contributes to the politicization and dissemination of scientific research and communication.
Because Wikipedia users tend to be more tech-savvy than the rest of the population, and because tech-savvy individuals are more likely to have science and engineering backgrounds, entries on these topics are some of the strongest in the encyclopedia. This website has grown into an immensely useful resource for background information on a wide range of scientific subjects, and can serve as a quick reference for any number of scientific facts. What is perhaps more important and useful, though, is the extent to which Wikipedia also preserves the debate and discourse around a particular subject. Two of the most important features that I point out to students when I teach them about Wikipedia are the history pages and the discussion pages. Unlike traditional archives, Wikipedia preserves not only its past representations, but also the discourse which produced the current entry. A strong example of this is the entry on global warming, which does a good job of dividing the controversy of global warming from the science on global warming. While the main page serves as a good primer to the science of global warming, students miss out if they do not also consult the discussion and history pages to understand how this article was produced. In prior models of knowledge, storing and recording important discursive histories was a less than transparent process; indeed, those functions were entirely unavailable. (Who decided that Pykrete was not important enough to make it into Britannica?) Now these features are relatively open to the public.
What this means for training people working in science and technology is that they will need to posses a new type of collaborative literacy, an ability to understand and negotiate an archival structure which is always in flux, and to which they can contribute. As we clearly see in the global warming article, not only does Wikipedia contain the “hard science,” but it also records and contributes to the politicization and dissemination of scientific research and communication. And, in order to be participants in these debates, students will need to understand the structures and rhetorics within which they take place.
And here the policy implications extend beyond Wikipedia, for it is not only about teaching people about Wikipedia but, more importantly, about this collaborative literacy in general, wherein the notion of the individual authority or expert no longer holds. To be sure, this runs counter to the ideology of most institutions where individual degrees are the measure of authority but, like it or not, the networked digital archive changes our basis of knowledge and training people for the future is about training them for this shift. What is no longer archived in the same way is no longer lived in the same way.
When I hear debates about the digital divide, access is often the largest issue, as if merely having access to computers solves the problem. “Bring computers into the schools and fund technology” are the regular solutions. However, the technology here is merely secondary: what is more important is teaching people how this technology changes the social sphere so that students too can be empowered to engage the polis rather than being passive users of Word Processing programs. Knowledge of how to indent paragraphs on a computer or make bullet points for a Power Point presentation is meaningless without the more important literacy of how to use these new media collaboratively to create a different kind of knowledge. Literacy in modern society means not only being able to read a variety of informational formats; it means being able to participate in their creation, with Wikipedia serving as the marquee example.
David Parry is an assistant professor of Emerging Media and Communications at the University of Texas at Dallas.
Comments on this article
This article displays an extraordinary naivety regarding Wikipedia. Such optimism may have had merit in the “idealistic” early phase when the site gave the appearance of potential. But for anyone to continue to promote the place in light of the numerous exposed flaws, scandals and set-backs since its expansion in 2005 is almost negligent.
The best course of action available to responsible, genuinely tech-savvy educationalists, is to explain the failures of Wikipedia. And to stress the importance of credible, reliable resources.
As good a place to start this education is here:
http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/is-something-fundamentally-wrong-with-wikipedia-governance-processes/2008/01/07
Also, the summary of the Siegenthaler controversy presented here is woefully inaccurate. This article blames the man for not editing his article? The falsehood had already been present for four months and propagated throughout the mirror sites before a friend informed him of the article.
February 11th, 2008 at 11:41 pmSpeaking of unreliable sources, I took a class at my local continuing ed. institution. It was molecular biology 101. The class prompted me to use Wikipedia to find Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem. It proved in 1931 that our current medical paradigm (reductionism)is, well, bunk. I also found excellent explanations of Shannon Entropy, one of the foundational concepts from computer science. It is also very useful in proving that our current view of genomics is, well, bunk. Even the top medical schools (like Stanford and Harvard) are just beginning to phase in Systems and Information Theory to replace reductionism. Way to go Wikipedia for being way ahead!
And my take on Wikipedia’s critics: The deomcratization brought by digital resources threatens to expose self-serving bureaucracies to public scrutiny, and they don’t like it.
February 12th, 2008 at 4:20 pmI am a fairly frequent user of Wikipedia. I have run across some very well written articles as well as some terrible articles. And I have run across lies, propaganda, conspiracy theories, and vandalism as well. Much has been made of the “self-correcting” nature of Wikipedia. That is a half truth. Wikipedia is at least as self-un-correcting as it is self-correcting. In a number of cases where I attempted to remove blantant inaccuracies perpetrated by (what appears to me) to be youthful ignorance of certain specialized academic subjects, other Wikipedia editors went back to re-add the inaccuracies. Wikipedia is a conversation at best. If any university student is using it as anthing but the most basic starting point for their research, then they are only harming themselves. Wikipedia is perhaps a good place simply to gather ideas for real research later, when facts can be properly verified. And I feel sorry for anyone who makes any decisons based soley on what they read in Wikipedia.
February 15th, 2008 at 3:30 pmA very good article, and I haven’t really got anything I could add to it, but I’d like to note - for the sake and the benefit of those who might read this in the future - that “Wikipedia Review” - one member of which apparently left the comment above - is a well-known anti-Wikipedia site, so that particular comment should be taken with a big grain of salt.
February 15th, 2008 at 6:37 pmI am always surprised that even as adults we resort to “either/or” positions with claims of pro- or anti-Wikipedia stance. Let’s say that pointing out limitations of Wikipedia does not make me an anti-Wikipedist. I am certainly glad Wikipedia exists, I consult it, but I do not consider appropriate for high school and undergraduate students to cite it as one of their main sources. And yes, in my high school, we don’t use it for social science subjects.
As Tint pointed out earlier, beginner researchers are not well served by Wikipedia. It’s fine to check it out, but one has to turn to other more reputable sources. Although as a librarian I am thrilled by the archived process of how an entry became what it is, as an information literacy teacher I also have to point out wikis’ limitations: it takes time and knowledge to scrutinize the entries. I understand that there are topics well covered in Wikipedia, but one has to be familiar with the topic in question to be able to evaluate it.
Regarding Siegenthaler’s entry, how does one value an entry signed by the person himself? Is there more weight placed if a witness writes it? What if that witness is a reputable historian? How does one get to be reputable? Even if we want a more democratic process in information sharing, we still need to be familiar with the topic and know who the authors are.
February 16th, 2008 at 9:33 amI think that Wikipedia can be used to educate but only if the teacher in question is policing the site and has the ability to fix any innaccuracies.
If they are not then they are setting their students up for failure. EVERY source has the potential to be bunk so a person needs to be aware of this and double/triple check your sources. Consult your teacher or professor about the sources you use and they can tell you if they consider them valid.
There is plenty of wonderful research out there with the invention of the internet and the database searches in libraries today but one must always consider the source and its biases when writing a paper.
February 16th, 2008 at 4:04 pmThe World Wide Web is an open book to be use at our discretion. Students need to learn not necessarily which sources are accurate but what information is accurate by viewing and comparing information from several sources, not just relying on one source alone. Asking/telling students they are to not use a source of information does not mean that they don’t, it only means that they will not disclose it in their references. There may be inaccurate information in any source but if you find one piece of information that is of use, do you still site the source? Of course - give credit where credit is due. If a paper does not have the correct information it is not the fault of the computer or the information it holds. It is the fault of the instructor for not teaching students how to back up their information regardless of the source. It is not the weapon that is a threat, but the hand that holds it.
February 16th, 2008 at 11:09 pmBeyond the content of a Wikipedia entry, I think the author makes a very important point: that providing a means for free discourse and open access and ability to participate in that discourse is a new and extremely valuable function of Wikipedia and similar sites. By gaining a reputation for being the best of its type (whether deserved or not becomes irrelevant), any website of this type concentrates the dialog in one place, thus helping to fulfill one of Ranganathan’s principles, “each reader his book”. The important thing is be skeptical and check other sources for EVERYTHING we base decisions on. As a librarian, I take every opportunity to teach library patrons to be skeptical about the sources they use whether it’s a book or a wiki. The problem of patrons relying on the first thing they come to didn’t start with the Internet or with Wikipedia.
February 17th, 2008 at 11:23 amAs a media specialist in a grade 7-12 school, I find this authors remark interesting. I working in a state where there are almost no media specialists in schools to teach digital literacy. I see students working with no ability to tell what is good information vs bad. They have virtually no skills to make that judgement. They use what is easiest and fastest. I use Wikipedia as an object lesson. I don’t avoid it. I make students check the sources at the bottom of an article before using the information. If the article isn’t cited they can’t use it. They won’t use out of date materials or books with old copyrights…but they’ll use a Wikipedia article with materials that are in some instances 50 years or older. So what good is digital information if it’s old. Also, this author doesn’t deal with how colleges actually do research. This includes material that is scholarly, authoritative, and age appropriate. In most instances Wikipedia is too low level for the average college student. I am all for digital information. I use the Internet liberally with my students and have been lucky to be a very early adopter. So a Luddite I am not. But the author before bashing educators for being wary should speak to the college prof’s that I deal with that have students post fake stuff to see how long it takes to be removed and the current time frame is often up to 3 months before stuff gets removed if done well. Some how the discussion should be about teaching information literacy at all education levels and providing adequate professional development so teachers can learn how to best use these technologies. When I stopped banning Wikipedia and showed students how to use better materials, I found the allure vanished and now they rarely use it because there is much better stuff out there. MY guess is that the author wouldn’t want his doctor to base his latest surgery on a Wikipedia article.
February 17th, 2008 at 12:18 pmI encourage my students to use Wikipedia with the provision that they may not cite it as a reference source. Like journalists, they must confirm the information from three independent sources (electronic sources such as CNN, MSNBC, NY Times, Associated Press, etc. are allowed and welcomed). To ignore or reject the wealth of valid information available on Wikipedia and other electronic sources would be irresponsible. I sure wish I had access to the volumes of information and the search capabilities as an undergraduate in the 60’s.
February 17th, 2008 at 8:39 pmThe above is interesting and informative reading, but it ignores the elephant in the room. None of the issues mentioned are new; most appeared in discourse in the early 1600’s when movable type technology sharply increased the general availability of information, i.e., books. The elephant in the room is *epistemology*, knowledge about the character, properties, testing, and application of knowledge — and of wrong knowledge. The absence of that topic here leads me to conjecture that today’s educational curriculum may feature much too much faith-based belief and not nearly enough reality-based study. That could be at root, why ‘epistemology,’ central to this discussion, doesn’t appear anywhere in it.
February 18th, 2008 at 11:53 amI generally find that Wikipedia is the quickest and best source of information on just about anything. I have contributed to several articles in Wikipedia and can assure everyone that my contributions are as accurate as humanly possible. As I tell my students it is extremely difficult to write a lot of nonsense and make it appear to be the truth. As others have said you should always check out the facts from several sources. However, when I have tried that time consuming process Wikipedia has repeatedly been proven to be the best and easiest to use reference. Don’t use Wikipedia as your only source of information but to ban its use is counterproductive.
February 18th, 2008 at 1:00 pmIvanacg asks: “how does one value an entry signed by the person himself?”
Same as historians consider diaries and first person accounts “primary” sources and journalist reports and research “secondary.”
I’d guess.
February 18th, 2008 at 4:36 pmPerhaps one of the reasons David Parry isn’t teaching at the main campus in Austin is his arrogant attitude toward those who have a discriminating skepticism toward seemingly authoritative bodies of work that are actually full of garbage generated by teenagers who won’t even disclose their real name.
For Parry and for Hubert Ling, above, I offer this passage from a Wikipedia article entitled “History of western Eurasia” — an article that got an account blocked from Wikipedia for even suggesting that it be trashed:
++++ —- ++++ —- ++++ —-
As the Viking raids subsided the Magyars arrived. Crossing the Carpathians they, in 896, occupied the Upper Tisza river, from which they conducted raids through much of Western Europe. However, in 955 they were defeated by Otto of Germany at the Battle of Lechfeld. The defeat was so crushing that the Magyars decided that ‘if you can’t beat them join them’ and in 1000 their King was accepting his royal regalia from the Pope. Otto on the strength of that victory was able to secure the tittle of Emperor. This German based Holy Roman Empire was to be the major power in Christian Europe for some time to come. As well as this “rebirth” of Western Roman Empire, the Eastern Roman Empire continued to be the up.
++++ —- ++++ —- ++++ —-
Now, we can wring our hands about how closed-minded it is to “ban” Wikipedia from institutions of higher education; however, that would be a red herring. Most of the institutions are saying that Wikipedia should not be CITED as a scholarly resource. Which it should not be — any more than a college student should be citing a Yahoo! message board as a resource.
Sorry, Professor Parry, but you did display an extraordinary naivety regarding Wikipedia here.
February 20th, 2008 at 2:14 amAfter 35 years experience as a professor in post secondary education, I thought you piece was so sensible and relevant, I blogged about it, trying to spread it further.
February 20th, 2008 at 4:38 pmhttp://joanvinallcox.wordpress.com/2008/02/14/web-20-and-responsible-educators/
Wikipedia may have the ability to be edited by, “teenagers who won’t even disclose their real name”, but how exactly does that have anything to do with the validity of the statement? If I anonymously post that “the world is round, and water is wet”, does that make it less true? When has knowing the name of the author REALLY helped in making sure what they write is valid? Is this so we can witch hunt them later? Have we taken the authors of incorrect information in previous editions of Britannica to task? Do we hunt them down and scold them?
The main difference between technology like Wiki, and Britannica, is the ability to quickly edit, and correct information as needed. If you feel that a wiki is wrong, and has bad info, then find the
correct info, cite it, and edit as needed. I would challenge you to recall all issues of Britannica to ‘edit’ a mistake. (guarantee they would prefer you simply buy $$ the next “corrected” issue) We are much more forgiving of the book because we cannot quickly change it, but with new media there seems to be a higher standard because it is new. Why do we buy into the myth that all people with access to technology must be intelligent, beKohs we daily see this to not be
true.
We should either hold books, newspapers, and news agencies to the same critique, or change our critique on new media. Double standards have long been the bane of society, yet we are very quick to hold those standards when it suits our interests.
We still trust newspapers that print retractions on hidden back pages, news reporters that go live with false information, and encyclopedias that print false information. Why not stand for change in information dissemination, as well as access.
February 20th, 2008 at 5:03 pmIt has been said that Wikipedia is open. That statement is false. It is known to be false by all open-eyed observers who spend a long enough time participating in the Wikipedia process.
It has been said that Wikipedia is transparent. That statement is false. It is known to be false by all clear-eyed observers who spend a long enough time participating in the Wikipedia process.
People who say that Wikipedia is open and transparent are either dissembling or simply not in adequate possession of the facts.
It is simply ludicrous to use words like “open” and “transparent” in to descibe a publication run by anonymous contributors, editors, and administrators. And that is only the first layer of absurdity in the claims that Wikipedia is open and transparent. Wikipedia administrators operate many different levels of closed decision-making behind the facade of public process. Wikipedia adminsitrators routinely and unilaterally delete the content and the contribution histories of discussions that they personally or collectively find inconvenient.
And, yes, the ability to maintain this level of deception and distortion depends very heavily on being able to operate without the accountability that is normally afforded by the use of real names.
That is an obvious truth, and people who affect not to grasp it are being either disingenuous or hopelessly naive.
People like that are not to be trusted with the world’s collective knowledge, much less the tasks of public education, information, and inquiry.
February 20th, 2008 at 5:50 pmIf you click on Brandon McFadden’s name above, you’ll get taken magically to a page that lists all of the errors from Britannica that have been fixed by Wikipedia. That’s marvelous. Why isn’t there a similar page on Wikipedia that showcases “Libelous and dangerous errors in Wikipedia that never would have been published in Britannica”? Because Wikipedia is administered by anonymous teenagers, that’s why.
Britannica never caused Taner Akcam to have his civil rights denied in a Canadian airport. Wikipedia did. Who at the Wikimedia Foundation took responsibility for that? Nobody.
I challenge Brandon McFadden with a more impossible challenge than recalling all issues of Britannica to edit a mistake: go write an article on Wikipedia about Carolyn Doran. She’s well documented by three independent reliable sources — the Associated Press, the Tampa Tribune, and The Register (UK). Go ahead. Get started. Get busy. Report back here with your findings.
February 22nd, 2008 at 12:17 amI consider Wikipedia to be the second most most useful site on the internet today (Google being number 1), and I agree with you almost 100% David.
While there are oftentimes blatant lies and vandalism on Wikipedia, this is outdone by the sheer amount of information that you can never find in books, the popular culture sections. Granted it is mostly because like you said, those who are editing Wikipedia are tech savy users, and that is why you can find extensive histories of Apple computer, Google, and Star Wars on Wikipedia, but at the same time i have learned a great deal of information of just about every topic that interests me, and that is the best part of Wikipedia, and the internet in general.
I often times spend entire nights up reading Wikipedia, and going from article to article finding whats interesting to me, I would never be able to do this in a book unless I lived in a Library, and had the location of every book in it memorized, and I could move at 100mph to get to that book.
As for the accuracy of the information on those articles, I am not a scholar in them, and I do not plan on writing any doctoral papers, or practicing medicine off of what i read on it, so if there’s a few things wrong with an article, there’s not much harm to me, or you for that matter.
That being said, i have no problem using Wikipedia for research in high school, and college level papers. Teachers are afraid of the digital age, and don;t want to move on. I’ve seen it in just about every college class i have where i’ve had to write a paper. Limit your internet sources to two or three, (sometimes none at all!).
I’m kind of rambling here, so its probably best if I stop now.
February 27th, 2008 at 12:31 amIt is a question of time before the Wikipedia self-destructs and implodes. It poses such low barriers to entry (anyone can edit any number of its articles) that it is already attracting masses of teenagers as “contributors” and “editors”, not to mention the less savory flotsam and jetsam of cyber-life. People who are regularly excluded or at least moderated in every other Internet community are welcomed, no questions asked, by this wannabe self-styled “encyclopedia”
Six cardinal (and, in the long-term, deadly) sins plague this online venture. What unites and underlies all its deficiencies is simple: Wikipedia dissembles about what it is and how it operates. It is a self-righteous confabulation and its success in deceiving the many attests not only to the gullibility of the vast majority of Netizens but to the PR savvy of its sleek and slick operators.
1. The Wikipedia is opaque and encourages recklessness
The overwhelming majority of contributors to and editors of the Wikipedia remain anonymous or pseudonymous throughout the process. Anyone can register and members’ screen-names (handles) mean nothing and lead nowhere. Thus, no one is forced to take responsibility for what he or she adds to the “encyclopedia” or subtracts from it.
This amounts to an impenetrable smokescreen: identities can rarely be established and evading the legal consequences of one’s actions or omissions is easy. As the exposure of the confabulated professional biography of Wikipedia Arbitrator Essjay in March 2007 demonstrates, some prominent editors and senior administrators probably claim fake credentials as well.
A software tool developed and posted online in mid-2007, the Wikiscanner, unearthed tens of thousands of self-interested edits by “contributors” as diverse as the CIA, the Canadian government, and Disney. This followed in the wake of a spate of scandals involving biased and tainted edits by political staffers and pranksters.
Everything in the Wikipedia can be and frequently is edited, re-written and erased and this includes the talk pages and even, to my utter amazement, in some cases, the history pages! In other words, one cannot gain an impartial view of the editorial process by sifting through the talk and history pages of articles (most of which are typically monopolized by fiercely territorial “editors”). History, not unlike in certain authoritarian regimes, is being constantly re-jigged on the Wikipedia!
2. The Wikipedia is anarchic, not democratic
The Wikipedia is not an experiment in online democracy, but a form of pernicious anarchy. It espouses two misconceptions: (a) That chaos can and does lead to the generation of artifacts with lasting value and (b) That knowledge is an emergent, mass phenomenon. But The Wikipedia is not conducive to the unfettered exchange of information and opinion that is a prerequisite to both (a) and (b). It is a war zone where many fear to tread. the Wikipedia is a negative filter (see the next point).
3. The Might is Right Editorial Principle
Lacking quality control by design, the Wikipedia rewards quantity. The more one posts and interacts with others, the higher one’s status, both informal and official. In the Wikipedia planet, authority is a function of the number of edits, no matter how frivolous. The more aggressive (even violent) a member is; the more prone to flame, bully, and harass; the more inclined to form coalitions with like-minded trolls; the less of a life he or she has outside the Wikipedia, the more they are likely to end up being administrators.
The result is erratic editing. Many entries are completely re-written (not to say vandalized) with the arrival of new kids on the Wikipedia block. Contrary to advertently-fostered impressions, the Wikipedia is not a cumulative process. Its text goes through dizzyingly rapid and oft-repeated cycles of destruction and the initial contributions are at times far deeper and more comprehensive than later, “edited”, editions of same.
Wikipedia is misrepresented as an open source endeavor. Nothing can be further from the truth. Open source efforts, such as Linux, involve a group of last-instance decision-makers that coordinate, vet, and cull the flow of suggestions, improvements, criticism, and offers from the public. Open source communities are hierarchical, not stochastic.
Moreover, it is far easier to evaluate the quality of a given snippet of software code than it is to judge the truth-content of an edit to an article, especially if it deals with “soft” and “fuzzy” topics, which involve the weighing of opinions and the well-informed exercise of value judgments.
4. Wikipedia is against real knowledge
The Wikipedia’s ethos is malignantly anti-elitist. Experts are scorned and rebuffed, attacked, and abused with official sanction and blessing. Since everyone is assumed to be equally qualified to edit and contribute, no one is entitled to a privileged position by virtue of scholarship, academic credentials, or even life experience.
The Wikipedia is the epitome and the reification of an ominous trend: Internet surfing came to replace research, online eclecticism supplanted scholarship, and trivia passes for erudition. Everyone’s an instant scholar. If you know how to use a search engine, you are an authority.
Wikipdians boast that the articles in their “encyclopedia” are replete with citations and references. But citations from which sources and references to which works and authors? Absent the relevant credentials and education, how can an editor tell the difference between information and disinformation, quacks and authorities, fact and hearsay, truth and confabulation?
Knowledge is not comprised of lists of facts, “facts”, factoids, and rumors, the bread and butter of the Wikipedia. Real facts have to be verified, classified, and arranged within a historical and cultural context. Wikipedia articles read like laundry lists of information gleaned from secondary sources and invariably lack context and deep, true understanding of their subject matter.
Can Teenagers write an Encyclopedia?
The vast majority of Wikipedia contributors and editors are under the age of 25. Many of the administrators (senior editors) are in their teens. This has been established by a survey conducted in 2003 and in various recent interviews with Jimmy Wales, the co-founder of the enterprise.
The truth is that teenagers cannot do the referencing and research that are the prerequisite to serious scholarship - unless you stretch these words to an absurd limit. Research is not about hoarding facts. It is about identifying and applying context and about possessing a synoptic view of ostensibly unrelated data.
Moreover, teenagers can’t tell hype from fact and fad from fixture. They lack the perspectives that life and learning -structured, frontal, hierarchical learning - bring with them.
Knowledge is not another democratic institution. It is hierarchical for good reason and the hierarchy is built on merit and the merit is founded on learning.
It is not surprising that the Wikipedia emerged in the USA whose “culture” consists of truncated attention spans, snippets and soundbites, shortcuts and cliff notes. The Wikipedia is a pernicious counter-cultural phenomenon. It does not elevate or celebrate knowledge. The Wikipedia degrades knowledge by commoditizing it and by removing the filters, the gatekeepers, and the barriers to entry that have proven so essential hitherto.
Recently, on a discussion list dedicated to books with a largely academic membership, I pointed out an error in one of the Wikipedia’s articles. The responses I received were chilling. One member told me that he uses the Wikipedia to get a rough idea about topics that are not worth the time needed to visit the library. Whether the rough ideas he was provided with courtesy the Wikipedia were correct or counterfactual seemed not to matter to him. Others expressed a mystical belief in the veracity of “knowledge” assembled by the masses of anonymous contributors to the Wikipedia. Everyone professed to prefer the content proffered by the Wikipedia to the information afforded by the Britannica Encyclopedia or by established experts!
Two members attempted to disproved my assertion (regarding the error in the Wikipedia) by pointing to a haphazard selection of links to a variety of Internet sources. Not one of them referred to a reputable authority on the subject, yet, based largely on the Wikipedia and a sporadic trip in cyberspace, they felt sufficiently confident to challenge my observation (which is supported by virtually all the leading luminaries in the field).
These gut reactions mirror the Wikipedia’s “editorial” process. To the best of my knowledge, none of my respondents was qualified to comment. None of them holds a relevant academic degree. Neither do I. But I strove to stand on the shoulders of giants when I spotted the error while my respondents explicitly and proudly refused to do so as a matter of principle!
This may reflect the difference in academic traditions between the United States and the rest of the world. Members of individualistic, self-reliant and narcissistic societies inevitably rebel against authority and tend to believe in their own omnipotence and omniscience. Conversely, the denizens of more collectivist and consensus-seeking cultures, are less sanguine and grandiose and more willing to accept teachings ex-cathedra. So said Theodore Millon, a great scholar and an undisputed authority on personality disorders.
5. Wikipedia is not an encyclopedia
Truth in advertising is not the Wikipedia’s strong suit. It presents itself, egregiously, as an encyclopedia. Yet, at best it is a community of users who exchange eclectic “information” on a regular and semi-structured basis. This deliberate misrepresentation snags most occasional visitors who are not acquainted with the arcane ways of the Wikipedia and trust it implicitly and explicitly to deliver facts and well-founded opinions.
There is a lot the Wikipedia can do to dispel such dangerous misconceptions (for instance, it could post disclaimers on all its articles and not only on a few selected pages). That it chooses to propagate the deception is telling and renders it the equivalent of an intellectual scam, a colossal act of con-artistry.
The Wikipedia thus retards genuine learning by serving as the path of least resistance and as a substitute to the real thing: edited, peer-reviewed works of reference. High school and university students now make the Wikipedia not only their first but their exclusive “research” destination.
Moreover, the Wikipedia’s content is often reproduced on thousands of other Website WITHOUT any of its disclaimers and without attribution or identification of the source. The other day I visited www.allexpert.com and clicked on its “free encyclopedia”. It is a mirror of the Wikipedia, but without anything to indicate that it is not a true, authoritative, peer-reviewed encyclopedia. The origin of the articles - Wikipedia - was not indicated anywhere.
It could have been different.
Consider, for instance the online and free Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Each entry is written by an expert but is frequently revised based on input from members of the public. It combines the best elements of the Wikipedia (feedback-driven evolution) with none of its deficiencies.
6. The Wikipedia is rife with libel and violations of copyrights
As recent events clearly demonstrate, the Wikipedia is a hotbed of slander and libel. It is regularly manipulated by interns, political staffers, public relations consultants, marketing personnel, special interest groups, political parties, business firms, brand managers, and others with an axe to grind. It serves as a platform for settling personal accounts, defaming, distorting the truth, and re-writing history.
Less known is the fact that the Wikipedia is potentially and arguably the greatest single repository of copyright infringements. A study conducted in 2006 put the number of completely plagiarized articles at 1% of the total - a whopping 15,000 in all. Books - from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, through David Irving’s controversial work, down to my own, far humbler, tomes - are regularly ripped off and sizable chunks are posted in various articles, with and without attribution. The Wikipedia resembles P2P (peer-to-peer) networks such as the first incarnation of Napster: it allows users to illegally share pirated content using an application (Wiki) and a central Website (the Wikipedia).
The Wikipedia does not provide any effective mechanism to redress wrongs, address problems, and remedy libel and copyright infringements. Editing the offending articles is useless as these are often “reverted” (restored) by the offenders themselves.
My personal experience is that correspondence with and complaints to Wikimedia and to Jimmy Wales go unanswered or stonewalled by a variety of minions. Even when (rarely) the offending content is removed from the body of an article it remains available in its history pages.
The Wikipedia has been legally shielded from litigation because, hitherto, it enjoyed the same status that Bulletin Boards Services (BBS) and other, free for all, communities have. In short: where no editorial oversight is exerted, no legal liability arises to the host even in cases of proven libel and breaches of copyright.
But the Wikipedia has been treading a thin line here as well. Anyone who ever tried to contribute to this “encyclopedia” discovered soon enough that it is micromanaged by a cabal of c. 1000 administrators (not to mention the Wikimedia’s full-time staff, fuelled by 2 million US dollars in public donations). These senior editors regularly interfere in the contents of articles. They do so often without any rhyme or reason and on a whim (hence the anarchy) - but edit they do.
This fact and recent statements by Wales to the effect that the Wikipedia is actually regularly edited may provoke victims of the Wikipedia into considering class action lawsuits against the Wikimedia, Jimmy Wales personally, and their Web hosting company.
The Wikipedia is an edited publication. The New-York Times is responsible for anything it publishes in its op-ed section. Radio stations pay fines for airing obscenities in call-in shows. Why treat the Wikipedia any differently? Perhaps, hit in the wallet, it will develop the minimal norms of responsibility and truthfulness that are routinely expected of less presumptuous and more inconspicuous undertakings on the Internet.
February 27th, 2008 at 10:40 amDavid, I agree that we should be very wary of institutions that ban Wikipedia. There are many, many reasons to be skeptical of Wikipedia, but it serves as great place to begin research. If one uses it as a rough signpost for information and not a completely authoritative source, one can glean a lot of information and avenues of research for it. Which is why I recommend that my students use the website when doing their research.
A larger issue is a change in the way that we approach knowledge. The current generation approaches knowledge with a sharing metaphor more than a harvesting metaphor; they are more likely to share their information, and edit the information of others, than are more traditional knowledge hoarders. When knowledge becomes free and readily accessible, it precipitates a radical shift of power from those who profit off of the exclusivity of information to those who profit off of the sharing of that information.
Perhaps Wikipedia is the new Gutenberg press? This time it’s not the clergy at arms…
March 15th, 2008 at 1:02 pmCharlie Gilkey,
That brand of pseudo-populist rhetoric might have fooled a lot of folks back in 2004, but it’s 2008 now, and Mr. Wales is running out of audiences who will pay his fat speaking fees so that he can profit from the knowledge that others have tried to share, all too often against the tide of ignorambots in his Elite WikiPalace Guard who are more concerned with controlling their “shares” of e-turf than they are in letting others share the wealth of knowledge that they, not the teeny-bots, spent their lives developing.
March 15th, 2008 at 11:01 pmAt the college level, where students are learning how to sort fact from fiction and fantasy, WP is a useful source of raw material upon which to practice that skill.
March 16th, 2008 at 9:43 am