what’s wrong with wikis?
As a graduate student, I am exposed to a lot of people hating on Wikipedia. It’s not like I don’t understand some of the pitfalls. Someone is always going to be quick to point out that
Swaziland (7 pages) is less thoroughly covered on Wikipedia than Gondor (9 pages)–although the latter is still beaten out by Bhutan (11 pages).
Although let’s be serious: the people who are editing the entry on Gondor almost certainly do NOT represent a drain on available resources for Swaziland. You really have to CARE about a subject to edit a wikipedia entry; noting a discrepancy between the information presented and your own personal knowledge (Cress & Kimmerle 2007: 159) is not sufficient, although I’m sure it’s a factor. Probably caring about a topic is correlated with noticing discrepancies; you know stuff about things you care about, and you’re motivated to ensure that other people know the Right stuff about them, too. This is why so far the only wikipedia entries I have ever edited are for Child ballads.
So anyway, you get bias, the way you get with any volunteer sample, but it’s unclear to me how different this is from the bias inherent in any information that someone cares about enough to teach you. Making everyone teach the thing they care about the least doesn’t seem like a workable solution to this problem. I think there’s also a barrier to entry into Wikipedia itself, though, separate from one’s personal knowledge and its fit or lack thereof with what the site presents. Cress & Kimmerle note that “sometimes people only add new information to an existing [Wikipedia] article, and sometimes people completely restructure an article” (2007: 158). I suspect that the people restructuring articles are experienced users who have developed a sense of themselves as Wikipedia-competent, separate from whatever expertise they may possess on a particular subject; new users may recognize their own lack of this kind of competence, and I think it presents a not-insignificant barrier to participation.
Overall, however, I still feel that Wikipedia is a useful resource. I refer to it frequently. Just recently Marc mentioned that it was to Wikipedia that he turned in his search for instructions for the preparation of spaghetti squash. This seems to represent one function of wikis, particularly smaller, less public ones: to build a database of relevant information to participants and make it easy to edit and access. One can easily imagine a recipe/cooking wiki devoted entirely to cooking instructions, and wikis seem to be a popular tool for teams involved in the development of particular products. It’s hard to pin down in these cases how a wiki differs from a very large, interactive FAQ.
Wikipedia, on the other hand, is often explicitly modeled after traditional encyclopedias, and many academics perceive it as some kind of informational Wild West, where anyone can say god knows what and nobody can be trusted to understand SCIENCE. It’s not peer-reviewed, after all.
In fact, as far as I know, neither are traditional encyclopedias. Most academics I know are all in a froth about the possibility of undergraduate students citing wikipedia in papers, but the real issue is that you don’t cite encyclopedias in scholarly research. Encyclopedias are by nature summaries, and you don’t cite summaries in scholarly research–you might, I suppose, cite a review article to support a claim about a particular broad trend in a particular field, but in most cases, you don’t want to be throwing around a bunch of review article citations, either. As I tell my students, you have to find the original source, because people do not trust your interpretation of Academic Telephone, especially if you are a freshman. That means no review articles and no encyclopedia entries, electronic or otherwise.
Maybe if more academics understood what a pain in the ass it is to actually contribute to something as huge and bureaucratic as Wikipedia, they’d have more respect for it, or at least stop acting like it’s run by third-graders with a strong commitment to homeopathy. Most likely we’ll just have to wait for a cohort of people to get old and retire–it is the most reliable mechanism for attitude change.
October 23rd, 2007 at 11:09 am
I agree completely, but especially with the point that the people editing the article on Gondor are not the ones you’d _want_ editing most academic topics.
I think many people are scared of wikipedia because it depends on human nature instead of law and coercion. It depends on the fact that there are more people who want the article on nuclear fusion to be accurate than there are people who want it to contain the vital information on how the plans for Mr. Fusion are entombed in the basement of GM headquarters. Similarly, that the people who want the article to say “I’d sure love to fuse with Becky Lundegard, heh heh” will get bored and leave before the people who want to edit their BS out will.
So it’s not objectively, axiomatically provable that wikipedia will work, but all the evidence is that it does. I wish the argument wasn’t so polarized — it seems like the empirically supported verdict is: Wikipedia is a high-quality resource, except that it should not be used when 1) the costs of an error are high and irrevocable, 2) you don’t have the expertise to sanity-check information on your own, AND 3) it’s your only source of information.
October 23rd, 2007 at 1:19 pm
I think there was a food wiki for a brief stint, which for some reason never kept up. I guess there are plenty of other recipe outlets online, making a wiki a duplicating project. Anyway, as a teacher I find wikipedia useful for historical purposes — for example, a quick summary timeline of welfare in America.
October 23rd, 2007 at 2:23 pm
Among librarians there are two major objections to Wikipedia. You hit upon one of them; it’s not peer-reviewed or otherwise validated by a third party. Traditional print encyclopedias are editor reviewed and regularly revised in a well-established routine.
The other objection stems from concern that library users will turn to Wikipedia not knowing the nature of it and think that it is as authoritative a source as one of the major print encyclopedias. The answer to this, in my view, is better library instruction and fostering better critical thinking skills in general.
As a librarian, I would tell people that Wikipedia is a good starting point but they need to verify what they read there and, depending on the situation, they probably shouldn’t cite Wikipedia (although I have had more than one graduate level course where it was perfectly acceptable to cite Wikipedia articles in formal papers).
October 23rd, 2007 at 3:31 pm
I definitely think that the mechanics of editing Wikipedia entries present a barrier that probably diminishes the quality of the content. I’ve edited numerous articles in Wikipedia, but mostly just to make small changes in wording or add a little bit of information. Figuring out the somewhat arcane markup language to do any more than that just isn’t worth my time.
October 23rd, 2007 at 5:04 pm
My mom is always talking about this because her middle school students try to site wikipedia in their papers. I tell her it’s a good place to start for gathering information on something. But certainly not a source you can take for fact. I like to use it to look up random things, or the histories of bands that I like, because you know those articles are written by people who care about the bands, and it’s unlikely that a huge section of information would be wrong there. Although I suppose it’s always possible.
October 23rd, 2007 at 5:05 pm
Wait - Wikipedia isn’t peer reviewed? I have to disagree.
When I submit an article to a journal, three people plus the editor read it and judge it for quality. Who are our gatekeepers, really? Those three people may or may not know what they’re talking about. I, myself, have reviewed 4 manuscripts in my short career as a grad student. I have been the ‘peer reviewer.’ I am a gatekeeper? Watch out, world! Flee!!!
Wikipedia is maintained, edited, critiqued, and reviewed–then revised, by ALL OF US. WE are the ‘peer reviewers’. Like journals, some reviewers are better than others. Like journals, some things get published that should have never seen the light of day. The difference is, with Wikipedia, someone can find that mistake and fix it. Journal articles are etched in stone.
So, I think that saying Wikipedia is not peer reviewed is misleading. Wikipedia is, on the contrary, in a perpetual state of peer review. We are Wikipedia. We are ALL the gatekeepers, now.
October 23rd, 2007 at 6:43 pm
Anomie, terrific point on credibility. Just as - as Laura says - “you know those articles are written by people who care about the bands,” then also the ones on nuclear fusion are presumably written by folks that really care about nuclear fusion. What makes that any less of a credible source? Or is it that we’re not as concerned if our band knowledge is slightly off, so long as we got it right in our nuclear fusion paper? I’m not convinced Wiki should be relegated to pop culture-dom if entries on (say) social theory strike one’s fancy just as much.
October 23rd, 2007 at 9:34 pm
There is a whole subculture of Wiki contributors and editors now. People who do nothing but read through page after page marking them for re-writes and quality issues. There are even Wikibots that scout for vandalised pages and revert them to an older version if they detect certain content.
Most Wiki articles have tags requesting citations and give optional or additional sources of information including academic articles. Anyone with half a brain would realise they should avoid using any information on Wiki for an academic paper without looking through the additional sources and citations.
And we both know what happens to articles about people who aren’t famous at all. :p
The worst thing about Wiki is both the interface in which you edit an article and the sanctimonious Wiki contributors who remove edits on articles they’ve written because they don’t want someone else touching it.
There are also a bunch of Wiki contributors who write articles on anything, even things they know little about, just to be seen as the author of that article.
October 24th, 2007 at 7:48 am
Must be something in the air! Yesterday we were discussing wikis on the message board for my archive course… oh, dear, what shall we do? Wiki pages change all the time and how do we pick the “definitive version” to archive?
My answer was basically that the point of wikis isn’t really to HAVE a definitive, finished state. If you want that, you can almost certainly get it elsewhere - sort of mirroring what everyone here seems to be saying: that you use the wiki as a starting point, and if you need to know the accuracy, you check elsewhere.
I’m not convinced that wikis can ever be records: a snapshot of a page at a certain date might be a record of certain received ideas at that moment, but it doesn’t represent the state of world thinking on the subject, and that… might not actually matter, maybe?
October 24th, 2007 at 8:43 am
I often find the ‘talk’ page as useful as the main page, for controversial articles… the parties arguing usually make it pretty clear what their biases are (intentionally or not).
I find it weird that academics would not be used to the activity of trying to glean the truth from potentially biased sources.