On Wikipedia

[anfalicious.livejournal.com]

OK, so this argument deserves it's own post.

In the last few days, wikipedia has been called "shittypedia", people have been laughed at for using it as a convenient source of general information and those of us who teach students how to use it have been called "brainless". I haven't been too diplomatic in my response to all of this; probably a combination of being sick and grumpy (not to mention a bunch of kids are up to no good around my place all the time and I have to keep going to tell them off) and also a combination of having to constantly fight ignorance about wikipedia in my workplace (I'm a teacher). There's a few points that need to be discussed.

Is Wikipedia Reliable

Firstly, what is reliable. Is the Encyclopaedia Britannica reliable? Should we expect there to be no mistakes? Should we take something written down as gospel? I think this is one of the great things about wikipedia; this very argument we're having. No source is 100% reliable. Every book ever written has at least one lie, half truth or deliberate omission in it. No source is truly objective and it's dangerous to think otherwise. In short, any source should be just one source amongst many. In 2003, an IBM study showed that most of the vandalism (a major source of the problems with wikipedia) is fixed before most users would feasibly notice it. This isn't always the case. For instance, that Joe McCarthy was the head of HUAC was on wikipedia for a full year before it got changed; one colleague of mine even had a parent come in and yell at him for marking down his daughters paper because of that fact; he was of the mind that because it was on wikipedia, it must be true. That's lunacy, but more on that later.

One also has to keep in mind that different topics have different levels of accuracy. A scientific topic is not going to be as disputed as a History topic; it's the nature of the fields. As this article in Nature shows, if you're after scientific or technical information, Wikipedia is every bit as good as EB. Indeed, Wikipedia is increasingly becoming an acceptable reference in peer reviewed journal articles (614 in 2009). A number I only see as increasing. There have, however, been some serious and real criticisms of some of the historical pages (Albania comes to mind). However, this is just representative of the fact that History is, by the very nature of the subject, disputed. If you think that the knowledge you have about an Historical event isn't disputed (beyond rather irrelevant things such as the people/nations involved, dates and places), it's probably because you haven't read a wide enough array of sources. Not only that, but if you learnt it decades ago at school, it's highly likely that the major opinions on the subject today didn't even exist when you learnt about it (the last 20 years has seen a massive rise in Post-Colonial and Feminist history; ie. history about the people that didn't matter to most historians (white males) who were dominant up until the 1980s). This leads me to the next part.

Know How To Use Wikipedia

Never, EVER take the information on wikipedia as gospel, without reading a bit further. For Historical items, the discussion page is a great place to start. If there is massive disagreement amongst the Wikipedia editors over a specific event, then it's highly likely that it is highly disputed in academic circles. After all, many Wikipedia editors are experts in their field. If there is a lot of dispute on Wikipedia, then it's unlikely you're going to be able to find out what happened with any degree of certainty, unless you're willing to use one source that agrees with the hypothesis you're putting forward (in other words, to be intellectually dishonest with your use of sources).

The next place to look is at the references. The Robin Hood article that someone scoffed at earlier today has a list of 107 citations for a 15 000 word article. That's about what you would expect out of a social science paper of the same length. There is a reference list of 27 books (again, fairly standard for the length), and numerous academic papers, conference notes and newspaper articles. Looks pretty solid right?

Not so fast! First, that specific piece of information you like, who is the reference? Google them, what else have they written, do they have peer reviewed research published? Are they employed at a reputable university? This can require some judgement calls, but all research ultimately is. This highlights the most important thing about Wikipedia; whilst it is good enough to settle arguments between friends or in online forums, for real academic work it is nothing more than a jump off point. It's where you get your overview and a good list of resources to hunt down. The discussion page shows you what things might be disputed so you can be skeptical of claims made with certainty in books that don't have the ability (or desire) to present such information.

If there is a statement on Wikipedia that has a [citation needed] after it, then disregard it. [Citation Needed] is one step from being deleted. The Wikipedia community has decided that there isn't enough information for the article to be strong, but it's not such an outrageous comment that it should be deleted entirely. Not all Wikipedia information is equal.

This leads me to the next point; featured articles. Featured articles are articles that have been rated as being of the highest quality. This is not an easy thing to get, only around 3000 of the some 3 000 000 articles on wikipedia are rated as featured. All articles get rated on the quality scale. From FA (featured), A, GA (good article), B and C. Articles deemed not complete get a stub or started status. This can be found on the discussion page, along with the history of the reviews for the quality scale. For the record, the Robin Hood article was rated a B. So perhaps the person who scoffed at using Wikipedia as the source was right to, but I would expect them to come back with exactly what they thought was the incorrect piece of information before writing off all the information.

What Is Wikipedia For

Should you be using wikipedia instead of academic journals? Are you crazy?!! Of course not. Wikipedia should be thought of best as an information aggregator. It is a collection of links that have been put together into a format that is pleasant to read. As a result it is not for original research. This is a big thing. Some have laughed and discounted wikipedia based on the fact that some pop tart couldn't change her own wikipedia to say she'd had a #1 single. Why should she be able to? Why should we take her word for it that she has had a #1. To think that people never make up things about themselves is to be somewhat naive I think. If someone wants to say something about themselves on wikipedia, then they need to have substantial evidence that other people feel the same way. Otherwise George W Bush could go on there and put "HE WAS THE BESTEST HUMAN EVAR!" and no one could dispute it because surely he's the best source on all things Bush.

Indeed, this is a problem with wikipedia; a problem that stems from the biggest problem with wikipedia. Most of the editors are white, male Americans. I'm not going to suggest that this is some vast conspiracy, or that these people are dissuading people from posting on wikipedia. Whilst I don't think it's the only factor, it is a factor that the biggest single demographic on the internet is white, male Americans. I'm not going to pretend that I can guess why these things are, as that would be silly without a longitudinal study with a very wide base and scope. However, this does mean that wikipedia has a tendency to have a white, male American bias, both in the information that goes online and the sources that it deems to be acceptable. However, the thing to remember is that wikipedia is open to all. If you think there is a problem with this part of wikipedia, if you think you see an article that shows this bias, do the entire species a favour and get on there and start contributing!. A good example of this is one I came across today (and I can't change due to the nature of the firewall I'm operating behind, so please, can someone go and change this). This is from the article on mercenaries. In the first paragraph:

A non-conscript professional member of a regular army is not considered to be a mercenary although he gets monetary reward from his service.

The use of the word "he" and "his" need to be changed to "they" and "their". Does this suggest misogyny? I don't think so, it just suggests that the kind of person who is interested in military history and science is not likely to be up to date on the latest ideas in gender studies. They probably wouldn't even have stopped to consider their use of gendered language. This isn't something that should be complained about, it's something that should be edited.


Hopefully my point of view now makes more sense and the fact that I actively encourage wikipedia use amongst my students no longer shocks you (the actual teaching of this in class is far more in depth and takes place across a semester at the very least). Hopefully some of you out there are now more informed as to how to use this fantastic resource to its full potential. Hopefully those who are uncritical about wikipedia will start to be a bit more critical and those who write it off as useless can see the full benefits of it.

I mentioned somewhere in these arguments this weekend that students at school today will probably never do research out of a book, at least not without the coercion of a teacher. Indeed, teaching kids to research online is vital, it means we don't have to spend lessons in the library (these waste so much time in a practical sense, the getting there, the lining up, the searching for the books, etc.), it means they can do research as homework, it means they will learn how to properly use this greatest of human inventions: the internet. Not to mention that the poor quality of most of the libraries in public schools I've seen (I doubt this would be much better in the US). High school libraries tend to be filled with crappy books of poor quality that are often decades old; in these cases I will take wikipedia as a source over these books any day. There are still schools in Australia using text books that teach that Aboriginals disappeared after European settlement (something that the almost exclusively Aboriginal school I now teach at find both saddening, infuriating and amusing). Wikipedia is definitely the equal of these kinds of sources. Not only that, but after teaching kids how to use Wikipedia I move on to teaching them how to use Google Books, the Google News Archive and Google Scholar. Students can get through my History subjects without ever touching paper, and I personally think they are better off, and have had a greater educational experience, for it.

Comments

[anosognosia.livejournal.com]

If by subject area you mean the claims of specialized academic study, well that sounds about right. I hope you don't expect this judgment to be jarring.

[qnetter]

Right - to me a technical subject must be entirely about technique - how to do something - philosophy is only partly so, at best. And certainly the study of Plato is not.

[anosognosia.livejournal.com]

Sure, but I don't think that is the meaning of technical here. We're surely after a distinction about specialized knowledge. If one wants to go to wikipedia, for, say, when and where Plato lived, how to spell his name, who his famous student was, and what books are attributed to him-- well then that would probably work out for you. I take badlydrawnjeff to similarly be implying something like this when he allows wikipedia to be a sound resource for "uncontroversial subjects." But if you went to wikipedia for the epistemology of Plato's Theaetetus, it's most likely you'd have read something that was completely at odds with the gamut of academic consensus, broadly construed. This isn't an accidental distinction. You need a certain sort of preparation to think critically about what the epistemology of Plato's Theaetetus might reasonably be, a sort of preparation you don't need to know if it's reasonable to say he was a Greek philosopher who taught Aristotle. It's a sort of preparation which demarcates the former sort of claim as specialized, or, in the idiom used in the OP--technical.

[badlydrawnjeff.livejournal.com]

You took me correctly, for what it's worth.

[notmrgarrison.livejournal.com]

I would think technical as being: All the extra types of bits that go onto a compact disk so that they play (when scratched), how e-readers work, math, physics, chemistry, programming and software design, ... and in general subjects that most liberal arts majors avoid as much as possible.

[anosognosia.livejournal.com]

Why would this be a relevant distinction?

[notmrgarrison.livejournal.com]

Plato's intention

The subjects I mentioned don't involve the easy to bs world of (pretending to know) intentions (of people who died a long time ago).

[anosognosia.livejournal.com]

Why would this be a relevant distinction?

[notmrgarrison.livejournal.com]

The subjects I listed generally don't involve bs, and their fields are populated by people who needed to actually know what they were talking about in order to get through their major studies - you can't bs and regurgitate your way through a math, physics, chemistry, biology, astronomy, computer science, or engineering exam.

[anosognosia.livejournal.com]

Great. So why is this relevant? I mean, if you're right (and you don't seem to be--a lay audience is no more familiar with specialized claims in math, physics, chemistry, etc. than they are in philosophy, and thus equally susceptible to bs), then this just shows that there's more of a need for quality control in these subjects, not less. So even if you're right (and you don't seem to be), it would only support the oppose of your point.

[my-wits-end.livejournal.com]

It seems to me that the difference is that math, physics, chemistry, etc. are verified either by a priori deduction, or by experimentation, so there is less room for dispute in these subjects among professionals working in the field, at least when it comes to the basic knowledge base.

With philosophy, or specifically the study of a particular philosopher's ideas, verification involves consulting and interpreting texts, something which is more subjective.

[notmrgarrison.livejournal.com]

a lay audience is no more familiar with specialized claims in math, physics, chemistry, etc. than they are in philosophy, and thus equally susceptible to bs

I would somewhat agree with that. But what I'm saying is the non-lay people in those areas aren't really susceptible to bs, nor did they spend years bs-ing there way through college. There are millions of them and any of them (with a decent GPA) can read pages involving undergraduate material from their field and recognize if it's valid, there's no "what were that dead guys intentions" involved. And especially with math - you cannot find two math books with theorems that contradict each other(unless of course the author made a mistake, which can definitely happen in the problems section, but all mathematicians can agree on which proof is correct). And as the above commentor said: "there is less room for dispute in these subjects among professionals working in the field, at least when it comes to the basic knowledge base."


As a side point, I fail to see how "no more familiar" and "equally susceptible" shows that "there's more of a need". It's like saying "Less than or equal to" implies "greater".

[http://users.livejournal.com/-wanderer-/]

Nor can you really BS your way through a serious discussion of Plato.

[the-rukh.livejournal.com]

Don't bother, its obvious to anyone else why its relevant, he's just being evasive so he doesn't have to make a real argument.

[notmrgarrison.livejournal.com]

You're right, pointing out how the Plato example involves bs is me being evasive, whereas replying with same question twice with now vague pronouns is quite the argument.

Your argument was even better.

[the-rukh.livejournal.com]

Him, not you.

[notmrgarrison.livejournal.com]

You know, sometimes it pays to carefully scroll back up.
(I assumed you meant to type irrelevant, but I only made an ass out of me)

[anosognosia.livejournal.com]

Another substantial contribution. Don't strain your brain. Baby steps.

[the-rukh.livejournal.com]

The source of this comment makes it amusing.

[anosognosia.livejournal.com]

That's encouraging to hear. If you can't say anything meaningful, at least you should be enjoying yourself.

[the-rukh.livejournal.com]

I know right

[anfalicious.livejournal.com]

This is what he does. Everyone else here understood what "technical" meant, he's trying to change the definition to suit his argument.

[anosognosia.livejournal.com]

No. Indeed, the case is quite the opposite. You and a couple other people are trying to introduce an irrelevant definition in order to suit your argument (and lol at "everyone else" when several people are saying the same thing I am, and badlydrawnjeff expressly chimed in to say as much).

The question is about the reliability of wikipedia. You say "Is Wikipedia Reliable[?] Firstly, what is reliable[?] Is the Encyclopaedia Britannica reliable? Should we expect there to be no mistakes? [..] No source is 100% reliable." Ok. Then you advance your position: "if you're after scientific or technical information, Wikipedia is every bit as good as EB. Indeed, Wikipedia is increasingly becoming an acceptable reference in peer reviewed journal articles..." That's interesting. Why is this distinction relevant? You, appropriately enough, by tell us why: "One [..] has to keep in mind that different topics have different levels of accuracy. A scientific topic is not going to be as disputed as a History topic; it's the nature of the fields... There have, however, been some serious and real criticisms of some of the historical pages (Albania comes to mind). However, this is just representative of the fact that History is, by the very nature of the subject, disputed. If you think that the knowledge you have about an Historical event isn't disputed (beyond rather irrelevant things such as the people/nations involved, dates and places), it's probably because you haven't read a wide enough array of sources."

Ok. Let's side aside the question of whether your characterization of the field of history is accurate. The distinction you've introduced is that of whether a claim is disputed, such that we can expect wikipedia to be "every bit as good as EB" when it is dealing with "scientific or technical information", which is characterized by claims that are "not going to be as disputed." Great, that's a substantial position.

Unfortunately, it's an incorrect position. I have pointed out why: in fact, "wikipedia is incredibly uneven and suffers from outrageous misinformation on technical subjects." I've given an example: "A good example would be the Plato pages, which for about six years were completely written around a theory that Plato's intention in the dialogues was to show how stupid Socrates is." I've made it relevant to your standard of measurement: "Things like EB often suffer from sparse or idiosyncratic information on fringe subjects, but Plato is not a fringe subject." Your claim that wikipedia is "every bit as good as EB" when it is dealing with "scientific or technical information" is incorrect.

Now, let's look at the response to my objection here. As an aside, the entire thread arising from this is tangential. I can give you examples from biology and psychology as well, and sealwhiskers has already posted links where professionals detail such offenses in these fields. So the idea that I am trying to pull a fast one on you by talking about philosophy rather than science is a red herring, for reasons that have already been discussed here.

But let's treat this red herring anyway, in order to assess the charge that I am being unreasonable. The charge is that the counterexample I in fact gave (notwithstanding that it's uncontentious that I could have given a counterexample which wouldn't succumb to this objection, as just noted, making this entire thread, especially given how bitter it is, a transparent exercise in bad faith)-- that the counterexample I in fact gave does not meet the standards of the distinction you laid out in the OP, and that it is plain to "everyone" that I am simply acting in bad faith when I suppose otherwise.

[anosognosia.livejournal.com]

Let's again review the standard of the distinction you laid out in the OP. It was that technical claims are distinguished by not being disputed. So the response to my objection must be that it falls perfectly within the limits you set out in the OP for wikipedia to contain the claim that Plato's philosophy is written to the end of illustrating how stupid Socrates is, because this is a point of dispute.

The problem with this is, of course, that it's obviously not true. This isn't a point of dispute. It's an interpretation of Plato's philosophy which is entirely off the wall, a flakey, surreal interpretation that will not be encountered by students of Plato at either the general level or the specialized level which goes deeper into the question of different readings. It is not a claim which we might regard as incorrect insofar as it is disputed and we happen to prefer an alternate interpretation. It is rather unambiguously misinformation. It does not belong in an encyclopedia article on Plato. Anyone who treated this article as a resource and returned this claim in an academic work would fail the relevant portion, or in a peer-review article would have the article rejected.

Thus my counter-example is indeed a substantial counter-example, exactly by the standards you set out in the OP. I introduce no other standards, but rather directly respond to the ones you have introduced. The charge that I mislead the reader with this objection is false. The charge that I do so with bad faith is revealed as itself an act of bad faith, or alternately an act of utter confusion by people not following the line of the argument.

Let's consider the two obvious objections to this line of reasoning.

First, it may be objected that obviously this claim about Plato is disputed, since someone wrote it (namely, the person who wrote it in wikipedia), and obviously someone disputed it (at least, me), and thus it is disputed and excluded by the standards of your OP. If this is what you mean by disputed, than anyone can write anything whatsoever on any subject whatsoever (including the hard sciences) and have it counted as disputed. This would make your position vicious circular and completely empty, as it would amount to saying that wikipedia can be expected to be reliable except in cases when it contains anything that anyone ever might disagree on, and we shouldn't count those cases against it's reliability. Obviously this is absurd.

The other obvious objection to make is that while I rightly addressed your comments about disputatiousness, they were in fact only a sidebar and not intended to introduce any distinction regarding standards of reliability; that you had rather left this distinction unspoken and intended the reader to surmise that for some unstated reason it had to do with the hard sciences. First, as already noted, there are counter-examples of the sort I gave which come from fields of hard science, so this objection wouldn't get you anywhere. Second, this objection amounts to special pleading, since errors of the like treated in my counter-example in fact count against the reliability of wikipedia, barring any argument as to why they should not, and so such argument has been given there.

So in short, you're completely wrong, and you either failed to follow your own argument or else expressly engaged in bad faith by misrepresenting it.