I have been exposed to a massive anti-Wikipedia mindset in college. Students are not allowed to cite Wikipedia, but there is no problem with citing other websites, so long as you use the correct format. Yesterday, I saw a graduate student give a talk, citing Wikipedia as having the most interesting information. She mentioned that she looked around on some .edu websites to verify the information, and found it to be credible. She was then chided by someone watching her talk because “you know that website can be edited by anyone right? The information could be totally false.”
I am here to expose the preposterousness of this argument. The Internet can be edited by anyone at large. Sure, you can’t just up and edit someones website, but you can create a new one. You can learn enough about design, html and javascript to give the false appearance of authority. You can learn the techniques of search engine optimization, and even if your information is blatantly false, many people are going to believe it when they read it.
What is the difference between “the encyclopedia that anyone can edit” and the rest of the 'net? If anything, you would expect that topics of interest on Wikipedia have more eyeballs on them, and are thus more credible than the rest of the garbage you find elsewhere. Wikipedia comes up on search engines not because they are employing expert SEO tactics (they aren’t), but because search engines recognize that the information is greater than or equal to what you can find elsewhere in many cases.
I think use of this great online encyclopedia should be encouraged, not discouraged. Students in particular should be encouraged to read critically, and to develop a good meter for how factual and authoritative the information they happen to be reading now in the information age actually is. Teaching them to close their eyes and trust the experts is just wrong, and is not going to prepare them for the real world they soon find themselves in.
But it’s easier to stomp on a Wikipedia page since Wikipedia is set up to be able to be edited by all and sundry. There are logs and The Powers That Be lock down articles that are being abusively edited, but the general principle still applies. Citing a web page on a reputable site is a whole different ball of wax because they are not (or should not be) open to public editing.
Were I teaching I would say that you can cite Wikipedia in order to avoid plagiarism accusations, but you must also have significant non-Wikipedia cites.
This topic has been studied statistically and the result has come out in Wikipedia’s favor. The very highly regarded journal Nature found that Wikipedia tends to be very accurate even compared against such adversaries as the Encyclopedia Britannica. Other experiments have shown that intentionally inserted minor errors like shifting a birth date by a few days tend to get corrected in a few hours by the power of millions of interested readers and editors.
While technically correct, it’s not so often true in practice. Most scientific articles on wikipedia are well cited, and you do have to be careful to check those cites before you accept the information. For academic purposes it’s best to use wikipedia as a starting point and only cite the original source material that the articles are based on, rather than the actual wikipedia artilce itself.
My children in Junior High and High School are being taught by the librarians that they should not use Wikipedia. So at dinner I must balance that message with the ways it can be used and how I use it on a regular basis for technical information at work. When I am diving into a new technology and need a quick summary as a starting point, I have found no better (as in it is extremely quick, to the point, accurate, etc.) site than Wikipedia.
Like any tool, it has it’s uses and it’s limitations, that is what should be taught.
Where did you get that from-- wikipedia? If that’s true, then you should submit a paper to Nature detailing the debunking of that article and see if it gets published.
The problem with Wikipedia as a source is not that the information is not true, nor that the information is not verifiable.
It’s that the credibility of the source in very many cases is untraceable.
I allow my students to use Wikipedia, but only if they can demonstrate that an article they refer to has either:
a) Authors whose expertise in the field on which they are writing can be verified (this is where Wikipedia almost always fails)
b) Citations to other credible sources. Some Wiki articles are OK on this point, but since there is nothing preventing someone from taking a paragraph there with an inline citation to particular source, and changing it to something that has nothing to do with that source, but leaving the citation, you pretty much have to double check on those other sources anyway to be sure, making Wikipedia often more trouble than it’s worth.
Even an apparently anonymous encyclopedia article has an editor that can be traced through the publisher, and their credentials verified. Wiki has nothing. Zip. I can go to a member’s page and change the details about them.
I am not saying this is impossible but your comment is positively odd. Nature is among the highest of the most elite academic journals. A single publication in Nature can greatly influence a young researchers career for life. Nobel Prize winners still do a victory dance when they get an article accepted in Nature. Although any source will have some problems with eventual conclusions, saying that Nature got “roundly debunked” on these boards does not fair well for your knowledge of the research and methods at hand.
Wikipedia is a wonderful development, a step forward in the class struggle for proletariat pedantry! And for factoid addicts, like most Dopers are, its is a boon beyond pearls. Had you told me 25 years ago that such encyclopedic information would be available to me without hauling my lazy butt to a library…I should have fainted for ecstasy!
The question of trusting, so far as I’m concerned, is whether or not I can post a Wiki cite in perfect confidence that some smart-ass sumbitch won’t score a gotchaya.
I have been long skeptical of the “open editing” thingy and expected far worse than we see. Surprises are very happy occassions for a pessmist.
A properly written Wikipedia article, like any other secondary research, should have citations to primary sources.
The real problem with citing Wikipedia (and to a certain extent, any online source) is the fact that there is no canonical version of the page you cited. The page you cite today maybe be edited or merged into an unrecognizable form tomorrow, and then again the next day. And since Wikipedia has multiple, esentially anonymous sources, it’s nearly impossible to distinguish between credible authority and untenable wankers. You can go back through the edit history of an article, of course, but distinguishing between the version the author of the paper cited to subsequent contributions is difficult and time-consuming.
I find Wikipedia to be a good, reasonable comprehensive reference to introduce a topic, but if I were writing a serious paper or report (that didn’t pertain to Wikipedia) I would definitely use other, verifiable sources.
3 or 4 times I have found minor errors in Wikipedia (typos and vandalism). I have never been able to edit them. Everytime I hit edit, it has already been corrected.
People with an interest in a particular article subscribe to them and get instantly informed of any changes to the articles of their interest. If the changes are obvious vandalism or way off, they correct them. It is not the power of numbers, it is the power of interested numbers.
Factual inaccuracies in Wikipedia are the least of its problems. Perhaps it’s just because I am ill-educated, but I rarely come across what I know to be factual inaccuracies in Wikipedia.
What I do encounter is badly written pages. Just about every single page in Wikipedia would benefit from heavy editing (in many cases, complete deletion). And it’s a free-for-all for obsessive nerds banging on at far too much length about their particular area of trivial interest. If you want to know about the seventh boss in the alternative path of some Sega Dreamcast game that nobody ever bought, be assured that there is a Wikipedia page all about it. There are probably as many pages about Sega Dreamcast video games as there are about, say, the Baroque period in classical music.
My wife used to be a fact-checker for a major magazine. They were allowed to use Wikipedia during the editing process to keep things moving, but they had to go to a more authoritative source for the final word.
My attitude is that Wikipedia is great for learning more about a subject, and is a good starting place for further research, but it shouldn’t be used as a source on its own. What you do is cite the article’s sources; if the article has no sources, that’s a strong indication that it’s unreliable.
Well, not only do I not really trust Wiki as a cite, but if somebody cites a blog I’ll also snort with derision. Might as well cite “facts” from an op-ed piece.
Because of the editing “feature” that you mention, really the only trustworthy (as in “free from post-publishing editing”) cites are those found in print.
I look at Wikipedia articles on popular culture once in awhile, and occasionally as a starting point for other subjects.
I distrust it on science-related topics, because it has proved in multiple instances to be a vehicle, sometimes subtle, for unscientific and quack viewpoints. As an example, while providing differing opinions on the vaccine-autism (non)-link, it seriously overemphasizes what little evidence has been found for concern, and avoids major evidence debunking the theory. I have found Wikipedia to also support other dubious alt med theories and to unjustly attack reliable sources that are skeptical about these theories.
I’d have no problem with students using it as one source of citations on a topic. But there are much better ways to research a paper.
Nature’s findings have certainly not been debunked (albeit they were limited to science articles), and anecdotal experience confirms it. Almost always I have found Wikipedia’s information to be corroborated by information from other, more traditional sources. OTOH I’ve found many “traditional” sources disagreeing with each other. The advice I’d have to students is simple: never overly rely on any single source.
That’s another problem: the type of information most common at Wiki isn’t, well, “scholarly” and the stuff that is scholarly (other than science) is well under-represented. And, again, the quality of writing is very uneven, even within the same article, with too many opinions are offered as facts and/or analysis.
For most historical events that occurred prior to 1995, your best bet on solid reliable information is still books.
If that’s true, then you should submit a paper to Nature detailing the debunking of that article and see if it gets published.