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Wikipedia ... a reliable source?
Mar. 26th, 2007 12:14 amSo, someone over on RPoL's Community Chat is questioning the reliability and usefulness of Wikipedia. He wonders whether it ought to be shut down before it leads the masses astray and causes the collapse of civilization as we know it. (Well, he didn't say it in quite those words, but still. ;) ) Anyway, I felt compelled to respond...
"There was an article just recently posted in Newsweek concerning the identity of a Wikipedia user who was known as "Essjay".
...
Why would that guy LIE just to fake articles in Wikipedia?"
I hate to break it to you, but this happens in places other than Wikipedia too. Including Academia, where professors misspend their grant funds instead of doing whatever research they're supposed to be doing with it, and then fake papers that get widely cited for decades before anyone notices. Long story short: you're going to run into that everywhere. It's not what everyone does or civilization would collapse, but it's a part of life. If there's a way to cheat a system, someone somewhere is doing it.
How do people eventually notice? Someone who knows better eventually comes along. Either by being observant, better-informed, or by repeating whatever study was supposedly done by the faker and getting different results. On Wikipedia, it means reverting back to a previous version of the article or rewriting it to be more accurate. This sort of thing takes time, though. The key word is "eventually."
What you seem to want is something that is absolutely, perfectly truthful and accurate 100% of the time, right from the start. You're not going to find that, because the world is chock full of pointless noise and not much signal. What you need to do (and all those innocent, naive high school kids who trust everything they read on the Internet) is to learn how to think. Learn how to be a good skeptic. Check the facts by going to the external links at the bottom of the page. Check the article's history. Read the Talk Page. Notice whether it's filled with professors saying scholarly things, or other high school students who just have a lot of time on their hands. And ask questions.
And know that professors can be wrong too. They're just regular people with all the usual human foibles. They worked hard to get their degrees in whatever they're specialized in, but it doesn't mean they know everything about everything. Sometimes it's a matter of how narrow their field of expertise is. Other times, there actually isn't any knowledge on a given topic to begin with, and then the professors are making guesses along with the rest of us (more educated ones perhaps, but still guesses), some of which turn out later to be wrong.
I just read a news article that one of the Wikipedia cofounders wants to "start over" - by starting up a new version of it, called Citizendium. In it, the guy wants better accountability by having everyone identify themselves (real names, etc.), and he wants to assemble actual experts to check things. Apparently it's going to launch this week. It'll be interesting to see how it does compared to Wikipedia.
My initial thought is that it won't work as well. The problem with having experts write/edit/fact-check these things is ... they don't have time. They're busy doing the things that they're experts of. :p And they often have more important venues to aim their writing at - conferences with their peers, scholarly journals, the students they're being paid to teach, Congress, etc.
Also, an expert in one field is not necessarily an expert in another. Or on the flip side, a piece of certification paper is not always necessary for someone to know a lot of stuff about something and have valuable input to contribute. For example, I'm a marine scientist with advanced degrees. However, for the past month I've been fixated on some music from a symphonic metal band. I'm way more motivated to work on Wikipedia articles about that, than marine science. How would Citizendium account for that?
... just some thoughts. I blathered a lot longer than I thought I would. :) Take-home message: don't expect the world to do your thinking for you. Learn how to do it yourself.
*****
And now I'm putting it here, so I can have something to compare back to after Citizendium has been going a while.
"There was an article just recently posted in Newsweek concerning the identity of a Wikipedia user who was known as "Essjay".
...
Why would that guy LIE just to fake articles in Wikipedia?"
I hate to break it to you, but this happens in places other than Wikipedia too. Including Academia, where professors misspend their grant funds instead of doing whatever research they're supposed to be doing with it, and then fake papers that get widely cited for decades before anyone notices. Long story short: you're going to run into that everywhere. It's not what everyone does or civilization would collapse, but it's a part of life. If there's a way to cheat a system, someone somewhere is doing it.
How do people eventually notice? Someone who knows better eventually comes along. Either by being observant, better-informed, or by repeating whatever study was supposedly done by the faker and getting different results. On Wikipedia, it means reverting back to a previous version of the article or rewriting it to be more accurate. This sort of thing takes time, though. The key word is "eventually."
What you seem to want is something that is absolutely, perfectly truthful and accurate 100% of the time, right from the start. You're not going to find that, because the world is chock full of pointless noise and not much signal. What you need to do (and all those innocent, naive high school kids who trust everything they read on the Internet) is to learn how to think. Learn how to be a good skeptic. Check the facts by going to the external links at the bottom of the page. Check the article's history. Read the Talk Page. Notice whether it's filled with professors saying scholarly things, or other high school students who just have a lot of time on their hands. And ask questions.
And know that professors can be wrong too. They're just regular people with all the usual human foibles. They worked hard to get their degrees in whatever they're specialized in, but it doesn't mean they know everything about everything. Sometimes it's a matter of how narrow their field of expertise is. Other times, there actually isn't any knowledge on a given topic to begin with, and then the professors are making guesses along with the rest of us (more educated ones perhaps, but still guesses), some of which turn out later to be wrong.
I just read a news article that one of the Wikipedia cofounders wants to "start over" - by starting up a new version of it, called Citizendium. In it, the guy wants better accountability by having everyone identify themselves (real names, etc.), and he wants to assemble actual experts to check things. Apparently it's going to launch this week. It'll be interesting to see how it does compared to Wikipedia.
My initial thought is that it won't work as well. The problem with having experts write/edit/fact-check these things is ... they don't have time. They're busy doing the things that they're experts of. :p And they often have more important venues to aim their writing at - conferences with their peers, scholarly journals, the students they're being paid to teach, Congress, etc.
Also, an expert in one field is not necessarily an expert in another. Or on the flip side, a piece of certification paper is not always necessary for someone to know a lot of stuff about something and have valuable input to contribute. For example, I'm a marine scientist with advanced degrees. However, for the past month I've been fixated on some music from a symphonic metal band. I'm way more motivated to work on Wikipedia articles about that, than marine science. How would Citizendium account for that?
... just some thoughts. I blathered a lot longer than I thought I would. :) Take-home message: don't expect the world to do your thinking for you. Learn how to do it yourself.
*****
And now I'm putting it here, so I can have something to compare back to after Citizendium has been going a while.
