More Discussion about Wikipedia’s Reliability as a Source
LISNews points to an article in the Syracuse Post-Standard criticizing Wikipedia and following up to an earlier article suggesting the encyclopedia as a good source. A high school librarian says "Anyone can change the content of an article in the Wikipedia, and there is no editorial review of the content. I use this Web site as a learning experience for my students. Many of them have used it in the past for research and were very surprised when we investigated the authority of the site." The article also includes text from Wikipedia’s disclaimers explaining the nature of the site and that they do not offer any guarantees about the information on the site.
Several people discuss the issue further via comments on LISNews’ post.
I shared the pertinent URLs with a Wikipedian. He responded by pointing me to the disclaimer on the Syracuse Post-Standard’s Web site, particularly the line "The service provider, its affiliates and its third party service providers hereby expressly disclaim any and all warranties, express and implied, including but not limited to any warranties of accuracy, reliability, title, merchantability, non-infringement, fitness for a particular purpose or any other warranty, condition, guarantee or representation, whether oral, in writing or in electronic form, including but not limited to the accuracy or completeness of any information contained therein."
August 27th, 2004 at 8:24 am
Hmmm. Seems obvious to me. In fact, I’d take it a step further – there are no guarantees of any kind of accuracy in any kind of web research, becuase the content there can always be midifed and the source is genersally unknowable. Certainly some sites are likely to be better sources than others, but it certainly possible to find what appears to be a very professionally put together site that contains a paper written by a high school student. Everything you find on the web as research should be cross-checked, with hard copy research if possible.
That said, it also seems fairly clear that the Wikipaedia is more subject to, um, subjectivism, than most sites due to the very nature of a wiki. However, that’s not to say that it’s not still a pretty cool project.
Thanks for the post;
kinrowan
August 28th, 2004 at 2:54 am
It would be interesting to see how much of the so-called refereed sources are plainly wrong.
Academic literature is mostly not rigorously checked by the referees.
I think a wiki has the potential to be better than a journal or a book – it just takes more time.
August 28th, 2004 at 9:29 pm
For the week before this post there were 330,000 articles in the English Wikpedia and 120,000 changes to them. It’ll be interesting to see what that rate of change produces.
For the longer term future, consider what will happen if the Wikipedia is accepted as the general encyclopedia of the internet. At that point, more of the professionals in each field will know that it’s the place to be if you want to explain your field and your work to a general audience. The natural reaction to that is likely to be those people ending up producing articles representing the consensus and/or range of view about a topic by practitioners in the field. Once this happens, how will the trust balance shift between a work where people must collaborate and works where an older and well respected person in the field, who may not be up to date with the latest thinking, writes from only one point of view?
That may prove to be an interesting challenge to the conventional “authority figure” approach to assessing the reliability of a source. “Wikipedia” itself may become that authority figure, in much the same was that “Encyclopedia whatever” is generally assumed to be reputable and its authors’ credentials not generally checked.
I’m one of the Wikimedia/Wikipedia technical team. Numbers given are rounded results of database queries I conducted myself.