I use Wikipedia, and I would not discourage students form using it in a responsible way, but there are problems with that go beyond accuracy and the sorts of problems that afflict encyclopedias in general. For one thing, there are things that experts know about their field, such as what is the consensus view of certain issues, and what sort of views are in the literature but are generally considered cranky, that can be very hard to source. This is just the sort of information that encyclopedia articles ought to be supplying (and that you often cannot get from the primary literature, unless you immerse yourself in it for years) but Wikipedia discriminates against it structually. If you write something like “it is generally accepted that X” you are likely to be quickly slapped by a “citation needed” tag by some clueless but overenthusiastic editor (if it does not just get completely reverted).
Indeed, in some ways, Wikipedia seems to have a positive bias against too much expertise. I once made a major edit to an article on a topic on which I am a recognized expert. Not only have I published peer reviewed articles on this topic, but I have been invited to write articles on it in three different academically edited encyclopedias. Nevertheless, within a day or two, my edit (which was very thoroughly sourced, certainly more so than most Wiki articles) had been reverted, on the grounds that it “looks like original research.” (Admittedly, I reverted it back, and it more or less stuck after that, although the passage I wrote has since been rendered less coherent, and less true, by various minor edits.)
Another problem is that the citations that do exist are often very poor. I have often been badly disappointed when I have looked to Wikipedia for useful pointers to the literature on some topic. Many Wikipedia editors probably do not have access to academic libraries (or do not know much about how to use them) and, probably, few casual editors are willing to do the sort of work of checking sources in the library that would be expected in a peer reviewed article (or an entry in a conventionally edited encyclopedia). This means that most of the cited sources are things that just happen to available on the open web. Sometimes these are just random people’s web pages, but even when they are relevant books or peer reviewed articles, they are often not the most appropriate, informative or reliable ones, just the ones that happen to be freely available and most easily Googled.
I think that I, and other academics, generally know enough to be be able to judge when Wiki can be trusted (which is quite a lot of the time) and when it can’t, even on topics that we do not ourselves know much about. I do worry that most undergraduates will not yet have this skill.
No, but each of the more than one million articles in the English Wikipedia represents a different “organization”. Some of the pages are guarded by loonies, some are waiting to be improved.
I’ve contributed to pages that have reached Feature Article status, pages that get vandalized frequently, pages that are orphans that nobody loves…my experience has been very different than yours. Perhaps it is a matter of attitude?
It isn’t productive to tell people that they should spend their free time working on a project that they dislike and consider to be without merit. I personally like Wikipedia and use it several times a day, but ITR champion said he hates Wikipedia and that he finds it “utterly worthless”. If that’s the way he feels about it then of course he isn’t going to want to edit Wikipedia.
It’s interesting that you began this post emphasizing the great diversity of Wikipedia, then concluded with the suggestion that since my experience differs from yours I must just have a bad attitude.
I have found teachers that did show examples of errors in Wikipedia to students as a reason why it should not be used, of course those teachers just spectacularly miss the point as it seemed that they did not bother to correct those mistakes.
In general the objection to students using encyclopedias, even an encyclopedia of renown, is that some students just stop there. I do not think academics feel threatened, just that they get peeved when students just don’t check the cites or look for better sources.
Any encyclopedia, including Wikipedia, should be used as a guide and not as a final word on a subject when a student is working on a paper.
Everyone who says “If you find a mistake in Wikipedia, you should fix it instead of bitching about it” is missing the point. I might fix mistakes that I recognize as mistakes, but it makes me wonder how many mistakes are there that I can’t recognize.
On the other hand, people who say Wikipedia contains known mistakes are missing a different point – every encyclopedia has those. Encyclopedias are simply not infallible resources, no matter how they’re written, and should never be treated as such.
If you see and fix mistakes in your areas of expertise, then others will see and fix mistakes in their areas of expertise. In this way, eventually the majority of articles will be of high quality and as accurate as Britannica.
Or you can ban the use of Wikipedia for class assignments and tell students they’re better off avoiding the site altogether. I don’t feel such an “abstinence only” approach is the best way to go, but it’s one approach to the problem.
Is it truly beyond your grasp that some people are opposed to the very idea of Wikipedia? That they don’t think the problem is that some articles need a little work, but instead believe that an encyclopedia that anyone can edit is in and of itself a bad idea? I do not personally think the world would be a better place without Wikipedia, but I can at least comprehend that some people do hold that opinion.
Other people may actually want to improve Wikipedia but be unwilling to put in the time required to ensure that articles they’ve fixed stay fixed. As I have already mentioned, and as njtt has apparently also experienced, it’s possible to spend a good amount of time improving an article only to have it reverted back to its previous sloppy or inaccurate state within days or even minutes.
And you, frankly, are reminding me why I do not trouble myself to “fix” Wikipedia more often. There are too many Wikipedia editors who act like cult members.
a) “Eventually” doesn’t help me now. Nobody’s talking about using Wikipedia in the future; we’re discussing using it as it exists in our present (time machines being presently unavailable). b) But what if it doesn’t work that way? What if I’m an outlier and other experts don’t pitch in? No credible academic or other sane person bases critical choices on what may or may not happen, in time, given ideal circumstances. (You try it and they start quoting *Candide *at you.) You can argue about whether crafting or teaching research constitutes a critical choice, I guess.
You did read the second part of my previous post, right? I haven’t heard anyone complaining lately that Wikipedia is worse than other encyclopedias (I did once have a boss that complained exactly that, but the very article you linked to, and a few others that came out around that time, shut him up pretty good). What I hear is that students nowadays don’t treat Wikipedia the way students back in the day used to treat Brittanica; that they use it more indiscriminately now. I take even this with a grain of salt, though, because these are most of the same folks that complain about the skills of Youth Today Being So Much Worse in general.
In sum, “Wikipedia is NOT EITHER worse than other encyclopedias!” is a strawman. Academics who bitch about Wikipedia don’t generally bitch about it based on that argument.
The University of Illinois uses it, and they’re the fifth-largest library in the US. They’ve had their share of Nobel Laureates in the past few years, too.
Admittedly, their use of the DD is a little wierd, but hey.
I couldn’t say whether students today don’t treat Wikipedia the way students used to treat Britannica, but many do treat Wikipedia in a way that they shouldn’t treat Britannica.
This is also my experience. My former boss was of the opinion that students should be told never to look at Wikipedia for their schoolwork and to always use Britannica instead, but she’s really the only academic I’ve personally known who expressed this view. I do sometimes hear complaints about sloppiness and inaccuracy in Wikipedia itself, but I far more often hear complaints about students using Wikipedia when they should be using scholarly books and journal articles. That, and students plagiarizing from Wikipedia. Plagiarizing from encyclopedias is of course nothing new, but with Wikipedia it’s very easy to cut and paste. (Some students also seem to be confused about plagiarism vs. copyright violation and at least claim to have thought that copying from Wikipedia was okay.)
When I cover Wikipedia in library instruction sessions for freshmen I make a point of telling them that *I *know that *they *know that a lot of the information in Wikipedia is true…but that this doesn’t mean it’s an appropriate source for a research paper. I explain that at the college level they’re expected to go beyond general encyclopedias and popular magazines and start dealing with scholarly publications.
Those of us who object to Wikipedia have no responsibility whatsoever to make any attempt at all to fix something we think is crap. Why should I (or ITR champion) lift a finger for a project that is doomed to failure?
Which is not true. If anyone can edit it, everyone will. Crappy articles will be edited up in quality, yes, but since most people editing it have no particular expertise, good articles done by experts will inevitably get edited downward in quality over time. It’s entire model dooms it to drift toward the average editor’s abilities, i.e. mediocrity.
The idea of wikipedia impacting textbook sales (as speculated in the OP) is interesting. I doubt too many students (even the most disinterested ones) would use it to replace a core text for an entire degree. But I could see students using it for niche areas of their course where before they would have needed to buy a text.
I’m an academic who likes wiki a lot, but it doesn’t really impinge on how or what I teach (chemistry) at all. Opinions on wiki seem to depend on what you’re expecting out of it - yeah the articles can be shite if you’re going to compare them to a top drawer text book, because writing (and editing) by committee is a reliable way to produce a poorly written article. But for what it is and how it is assembled, it’s a triumph IMHO.