More Challenges to Wikipedia’s Authority
Dispatches from the Frozen North suggests a number of ways someone could create lasting errors in Wikipedia. This blogger tried some and succeeded: none of the errors were caught and corrected until the blogger ended the experiment.
Joi Ito writes about some of the mechanisms in place to catch changes. A number of people added to the discussion via comments.
I still think it’s funny that so many people are riled up about the quality of information in Wikipedia when they probably wouldn’t think about analyzing the quality of information in printed materials in the same manner. How many times do we read a journal article or a nonfiction book without knowing anything about the author or enough about the subject to know the quality or validity of what we’re reading? Why is it easier for some people to trust words written on printed paper than it is to trust words on a wiki?
The blogger’s experiment is exactly why I approach a source like Wikipedia with caution. It’s like what I tell people I teach about evaluating sources: if you aren’t sure about the quality of what you’re reading, get another opinion. Some information will be available in another source. One of the concerns librarians seem to have with Wikipedia is that its users may not know enough about evaluating information to even consider that what they’re looking at could be incorrect, especially school children using it as a source for a report. Does this mean we should shift from hammering on Wikipedia to becoming more aggressive about educating people on how to evaluate information sources?
There are several things Wikipedia could do to raise its quality in the minds of many people. James Day comments that Wikipedia is considering better ways to cite sources and name contributors. That would help a lot of people follow the information trail and know the credentials of contributors.
Addendum 10/19: ahockley of Dropped Packets makes my point better than I do: we should hold print sources to a higher standard–or the same standard as we do projects like Wikipedia.
