Do (some) academics feel threatened by Wikipedia?

In My Humble Opinion
1

In college I’ve heard a lot of educators badmouth Wikipedia. It goes beyond merely not accepting it as a cited reference on a research paper, which is totally reasonable. But they like to actively talk trash about it and take every opportunity to mention just how wrong everything on it is and how gullible anyone must be who believes anything on it could possibly be factual, you know, given how unreliable it is.

I may be exaggerating the extremity of this attitude, but nonetheless I find it to be overwhelmingly inaccurate (the attitude, not Wikipedia). I was just as skeptical as anyone back in the days when I first heard about Wikipedia’s premise, but it’s turned out to be an amazingly thorough and well-researched resource. Of course vandalism and factual inaccuracies occur, but the speed at which they are corrected is also astonishingly good.

I suspect a few potential reasons for the highly negative attitude toward Wikipedia that I’ve seen in academia:

  • It’s new and revolutionary in how it works and they are largely accustomed to the Ancient Times in which trusted gatekeepers of knowledge were necessary to collect and vet information before publishing it to the world. As academics, they were those gatekeepers so it’s something of a threat to their position. (of course, many of the Wikipedia editors who basically serve the same function are academics themselves, but they are the rogue ones)

  • It’s too damn easy. Verifying a relatively simple fact back in the Ancient Times required a trip to the library, navigating rows and rows of books with Dewey Decimals, pouring through indices and glossaries and probably often making multiple attempts at this before the desired information could be located. That same information today can usually be found within about 15 seconds from the comfort of your home computer desk. And frankly, it pisses them off that they had to spend all that time doing it the hard way. Hell, I’d probably be pissed too if I had lived back then.

  • They just generally don’t like change and are more reluctant to accept it than someone like me who has more or less grown up having these kinds of resources available.

  • They wrote a textbook and sales are steadily declining. They blame Wikipedia.
    So that’s my theory. And it’s not like print books are infallible anyway - the way professors frame it you’d think once something is published on paper it’s automatically the golden word of the Almighty. But I’ve seen a lot of bogus shit in print books too. I get that there’s less accountability with Wiki, but you can’t just ignore the fact that an incredible, intelligent, and enthusiastic community has maintained it very well. It’s a grave insult to them to suggest that Wikipedia is full of baloney. It isn’t.

2

If the only libraries you go to have Dewey Decimals, than I am not surprised that this issue either arises or is perplexing in your neighborhood of the world.

3

I haven’t had a professor bad mouth Wikipedia. They all tell us we can use it as a launching point but that we have to confirm everything with a different source. This is true even of the professor who did write the textbook.

4

I understand the words but I have no idea what you’re trying to say with this comment.

5

  1. Some academics are rightly aggrieved by students who seem to refuse to understand Wikipedia’s limitations and treat it like an infallible, comprehensive source. Most of them would be just as aggrieved by students who treated traditional encyclopedias as legitimate resources for college-level research, but there seem to be many more nowadays who over-rely on Wikipedia than there were back in the day who over-relied on Encyclopedia Brittanica.

  2. Some academics have found errors in Wikipedia articles relating to their expertise, and overgeneralize about it. Sometimes the “errors” they find would not be seen as errors by other reasonable experts, but because it’s Wikipedia, they blame the source instead of questioning their perspective.

6

I think that’s “your library sucks, real academic libraries use the Library of Congress system.”

7

I don’t think the DD system is used in any libraries that have any serious research going on. I could be wrong.

8

OK, but I only mentioned it as a throwback to the past and didn’t imply anything like what that poster said. It just struck me as an odd non-sequitur.

9

I’m a math professor, and I encourage my students to use Wikipedia as a resource. Many of the math articles are really good. I’ve only seen a positive attitude toward Wikipedia, and I probably know a lot more academics than you.

10

It’s funny that you say that, because there basically are gatekeepers to knowledge on wikipedia. Roving bots will automatically revert anything by an anonymous person, officially to avoid dozens of pages that say nothing but “penis” but this has the secondary effect of requiring anyone who actually wants to edit to log in. And since anyone can edit, anyone can remove your edits as well. Which edits stay are usually determined by who is in better standing in the community; the biggest honchos can even lock pages if they feel it is the only way to stop an edit war. All of this means that the thousand or so “wikiholics” have become the gate-keepers of wikipedia; anyone who wants to add information has to be in good standing with them to make changes that stick.
(IOW, those editors are not “rogue ones” but are the norm)

11

Aside from letting students know they shouldn’t cite Wikipedia, the biggest problem I’ve heard some professors say they had with the site is the fact that anyone can edit it, which, in turn, brings up issues of proper citation and plagiarism.

I don’t buy it. Given that Wikipedia users aren’t exactly creating their information out of thin air I think the academicians are still the gate keepers.

Nope. Even history professors are big fans of the new and exciting ways information is being made available to people.

Seriously? While you’ll certainly find a few Luddites I think you’ll find most of them are happy with changes that make information more accessible.

What percentage of college professors would you say this is true of?

You have strange professors. I had one professor who assigned us bad journal articles to read on purpose. Part of the reason he did so was to drill into our heads that just because something was published it didn’t automatically equate to quality. The other part being that it would help us pick apart arguments.

Aside from telling us not to cite from Wikipedia and giving us a list of reasons why I don’t generally hear professors rail against the site on a regular basis. In my American Revolutionary class one assignment was to compare a wiki article on a battle (Cowpens?) to the currently scholarly work on the subject. The majority of the class as well as the professor all thought the Wiki article was pretty good. It’s still not an appropriate source for an academic paper but it’s a great place to get introduced to a topic and even mine for sources at times.

12

There are surely some who are threatened. Some decried the use of calculators because students would lose the ability to perform the math operations themselves. Like that’s the point :rolleyes: The same sort of things were said about PCs, and I’m sure once the same was said about slide rules.

Thag say no fair use sharp rock cut mammoth meat!!

The thing is, those guys were and are useless farts who are serious when they talk about how good the old days were. They’re threatened by anything that makes their old bag of tricks smell stale.

The other thing is, there aren’t many. They become jokes and symbols of obsolescence. They spend their time thinking of some obscure example to prove that the old way of doing things was better. And then one day they start to use the new stuff themselves, first in private, realizing how foolish they will appear if seen employing the object of their scorn. Then they say how it wasn’t any good when everybody else started using it, but now that its improved it’s okay.

So there will always be some who spend their lives looking only at the past, and have the fear of the future natural to those approach it walking backwards

13

I was told by academics in a Pit thread that one of the actual purposes of academics was elitism. Thus, if people can get a usable information source from somewhere outside of academia, it threatens the institution.

I’m glad to hear that such elitism is not as common as I was led to believe.

14

Academic research by its very nature is back tracking and checking every fact and step of reasoning and double checking. Referring to Wikipedia is just a start the same way opening a book is preparatory to reading it. After all of that checking and confirming, then you are ready to add your new insight and have all the muckity-mucks tear it to pieces even after you have checked that over 15 times. And that is just a term paper.

A wiki article is like giving a geeky nerd a new piece of electronic equipment: take it apart, put it back together, try to adapt something about it to something new. But if you just show up with plagarized wiki, expect to be spotted right away. It’s like some tool who wants to hang out with the nerds but won’t try to take apart his iPhone. Wiki is meant to be broken down and rebuilt.

15

I have never seen a bot revert anything that wasn’t vandalism, and you absolutely do not need to be logged in to edit. I have seen plenty of edits by anonymous users that are left in place.

I have never seen any evidence of “gatekeepers”. Logged in users have a watch list, which they can add articles to. The user can then view their watch list and see at a glance if any changes have been made to these articles. Users are free to use their watch list in any way that they desire, but I personally have every article I have ever edited on my watch list. If I see an edit done by an anonymous IP user, I immediately go and look to see what the changes are, because more often than not it’s vandalism. If it’s a good edit though, I let it stand. I guess the fact that I do this makes me one of your “gatekeepers”, but in reality I’m just some shmuck from Pennsylvania with no connection at all to the wikipedia powers that be. I’m just another user.

If there is a dispute, a discussion generally will take place on the article’s talk page. In my experience, a consensus is formed according to who makes the better argument, not according to any “standing in the community” or anything along those lines. If the dispute decays into an all out edit war, then yes, the head honchos can step in and lock the article. I personally don’t see anything wrong with that. Sometimes it is the only way to stop folks from misbehaving.

16

I’m a physics professor and I encourage my students to use Wikipedia. The high-energy physics articles are typically sound, in my experience. However, if I ask students to cite sources for a project or presentation, I’ll generally tell them to make sure they have at least one reference that is not Wikipedia.

I have not personally encountered an anti-Wikipedia attitude among professors.

17

That is possibly true in the US, but it is not true everywhere else.

ETA: that is to say, I study at a university that is rated in the top 200 in the world, and the library is organised by the DD system.

18

I was a TA in two pop music courses, and can offer you a rant against wikipedia, if you’d like.

If you’re asking someone to write a term paper on issues in popular music, I can anonymously cite (at least) two dozen papers in a full lecture course which make use of wikipedia, the author’s worthless opinion, and a long string of unintelligible youtube hyperlinks that are never explained or properly cited.

Obviously you’re not going to find the Continental Journal of Woka Flocka Flame, but there’s a lot of work out there which deals with popular music in peer reviewed form, or is otherwise an academic text. You may not find sources discussing precisely artist x, but you can draw parallels from other works, examine interviews they’ve had in print media, even look at the liner notes to their albums or their own home pages. As far as I know, a discussion on whether wikipedia was acceptable was motioned a few years back at the Canadian University Music Society’s AGM. The consensus was that it was not, even though it may be a useful starting ground for bands and artists that are so new you can’t find any other information on them.

My biggest gripe is that there are so many wonderful resources that a school library has, even online, such as peer reviewed journals, encyclopedias, and access to listening databases. At University, you’re not only writing papers to get a diploma and work in an office somewhere, at some point you are supposed to be learning how to–gasp–do proper research. Where do you go, what do you do when you can’t find anything on a given topic on wikipedia? That means you’ve got to start searching microfiche and serials and thick dusty books and online journals where, God forbid, you have to type in your library card number at a prompt. Wikipedia shows the grader or the professor that you’re woefully ignorant to all these other means of amassing information; I’ve never personally known a professor or TA who’s turned away a first year undergrad when he or she said “I can’t find any sources outside of wikipedia, could you help me?” If you then know how to find this information, or otherwise can’t be bothered to ask for help, then it shows me how little you care about the term paper or its instructions that you still fall back on wikipedia.

But the OP said outside of term papers, fine. I’m not American, but I follow U.S. politics. Didn’t John McCain get busted in a speech for listing a bunch of facts about the country of Georgia point by point from Wikipedia? I bet he didn’t do it himself (he doesn’t strike me as especially tech savvy; he admitted he doesn’t answer his own e-mails), but someone on his campaign trail couldn’t be bothered to double check facts that were being spoken authoritatively in front of dozens of reporters. It’s part of a greater problem with superficial, instantaneous collection of knowledge. Twitter, Facebook, Wikipedia…yellow journalism and blatantly wrong facts have never been easier to propagate than in the internet age, where speed seems more important than accuracy. And insofar as the university academic considers himself or herself at the vanguard of human knowledge, yeah, I’m sure they resent someone treating wikipedia as anymore of an authoritative source than say, asking your dad.

19

I teach students how to use Wikipedia, which is as a great beginning source for information but not one that you want to cite. I tell them only cite information from wiki if you find it verified by another source (especially if they don’t give the reference) and then cite the other source.

20

Exactly.

If the libraries you frequent use Dewey Decimals to catalog their books, then you shouldn’t really consider yourself as being in any kind of position to criticize academia.

That’s what I am saying.