A screenshot of the first result from a Google search of “reliability of Wikipedia.”
“Wikipedia is a free, web-based, collaborative, multilingual encyclopedia project supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Its twenty million articles (over 3.79 million in English) have been written collaboratively by volunteers around the world. Almost all of its articles can be edited by anyone with access to the site, and it has about 90,000 regularly active contributors. As of July 2011, there are editions of Wikipedia in 282 languages. It has become the largest and most popular general reference work on the Internet, ranking sixth globally among all websites on Alexa and having an estimated 365 million readers worldwide. It is estimated that Wikipedia receives 2.7 billion monthly page views from the United States alone.”
Where did this well-written, informative and highly reliable (there were ten citations and thirteen links in this paragraph alone before I removed them) definition of Wikipedia come from? The Wikipedia page on Wikipedia, of course. In fact, most of the research I did for this article came from Wikipedia, and that wasn’t even something I did intentionally. It just so happens that when you Google “reliability of Wikipedia,” the first result that pops up is a Wikipedia page entitled “Reliability of Wikipedia.” Something about that felt right.
It’s time to come out and say it: we all use Wikipedia. We all use it every day. We use it to look up obscure tidbits of information that are bugging us and we use it when we’re at a loss when beginning an essay. Even though teachers and professors may be the biggest opponents of the use of Wikipedia, many of them will likely admit to using it too. During my senior year of high school I walked into my AP Physics teacher’s office to ask him for help on a homework problem. He was looking at the Wikipedia page about the material we were covering in the next day’s class to remind himself which direction the force of a magnetic field traveled in a certain example. He was the best teacher I’ve ever had, and he used Wikipedia.
There is simply nowhere better in the world to look for quick reference information than Wikipedia. It is the Internet’s response to the type of nagging questions that keep us up at night. This, though, wasn’t necessarily the goal that the founders of Wikipedia had in mind. Sue Gardner, executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation, stated in a New York Times article marking the tenth birthday of Wikipedia, that the ultimate goal of Wikipedia is “to offer the sum of total of all human knowledge in the native language of all of Wikipedia’s users.” Essentially, Wikipedia’s mission is to be able to give the totality of human knowledge to all people with a computer and Internet access.
If this goal were accomplished today I doubt that teachers and professors would be critical about students using the site. It’s not uncommon to hear professors going on tirades about not even thinking about looking at Wikipedia while writing an important essay. It wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to imagine my high school physics teacher going on a similar rant if he were the one who had caught me using the site. The reasoning behind this makes sense. If anyone in the world can change millions of articles to make them say anything they want them to, how can any of it be trusted to be reliable?
Wikipedia has a review process, although this process is markedly different than the process behind a standard peer-reviewed source. Although the authors behind any given Wikipedia article don’t necessarily hold degrees in the fields of the content they are creating, the idea is that, over time, incorrect information can be removed until an accurate consensus can eventually be agreed upon as bits of information are patched together. There are many ways that this model can be corrupted, but Wikipedia tries to combat these with locks and protections on sections of articles or even whole articles themselves. There are also extensive guidelines on how to edit correctly.
As far as reliability goes, Wikipedia is highly accurate in many ways. Any type of vandalism or gross inaccuracy is generally removed so quickly by the vast community of editors that most users will never encounter any of these— ever. The biggest criticisms that come from expert reviews are of structure, not of content. In fact, in December 2005, a single-blind study comparing science articles from Wikipedia to articles from Encyclopaedia Britannica performed by Nature found that most Wikipedia articles were just as accurate as their counterpart articles. While some of the biggest criticisms of Wikipedia come from academia, experts in academic fields generally find Wikipedia articles to be more accurate than non-experts do, according to a study conducted by the website Ars Technica. This doesn’t mean that Wikipedia is always a good source as there have been very notable cases of inaccurate information. One such instance was when, for twenty months, the site said that Hillary Clinton was the valedictorian of her class at Wellesley (she wasn’t). Numerous other editing scandals have taken place; most of them have been well-publicized due to political campaign spinning.
It’s hard to imagine, however, anything changing for students using the site. In the last ten years our brains have been wired for Wikipedia. The biggest question is whether it’s preferable for students to go on pretending they’re saintly, pretending to have never even viewed a Wikipedia page, or whether we all would be better off if we came out, professors included, and admitted to the love affair going on between information-thirsty students and Wikipedia. I’m hardly suggesting that it should be okay for Wikipedia to be used as a main source; rather, I’m suggesting that it would create a more comfortable and more preferable environment for academia to open itself up to this form of base-up transparency. Honesty in information is a key component to the establishment of a trusting relationship. Furthermore, having academia alongside Wikipedia would aid the site in accomplishing its goals of becoming a democratic information-pillar for the twenty-first century. •
It’s amazing how much of the Wikimedia Foundation’s public relations pablum you’ve managed to shoehorn into this article, but I’ll give you a couple of simple rebuttals.
You say (or Wikipedia says) that Wikipedia’s articles “have been written collaboratively by volunteers around the world”. What about the many articles that I have been paid to author and publish on Wikipedia? Am I some sort of paid volunteer?
Another canard: “Any type of vandalism or gross inaccuracy is generally removed so quickly by the vast community of editors that most users will never encounter any of these— ever.” The University of Minnesota conducted a study of “damaged views” of Wikipedia, and they were on such an increasing trajectory over time, it resembled a power-law curve. I also chaired a systematic study of the 100 articles about current U.S. senators. We found that these articles are deliberately wrong with false information, inserted for joke or for vendetta, about 6.8% of the time. That means every day, just on the articles about government officials alone, probably thousands of readers are being deliberately misguided by the text in Wikipedia. Quite the opposite of “most users will never encounter any of these — ever.”
Kyle, I suggest some more college for you until you begin to recognize when you’ve been duped.
Mr Gregory Kohs apparently has an alert on every news item that appears about Wikipedia, and quite systematically posts a message highly critical of Wikipedia (not to mention ad hominem criticism of the author of the article).
Mr Kohs wonders out loud who pays whoever writes articles on Wikipedia, whether they’re mostly volunteers as pretended. I wonder who pays Mr Kohs – most people out there have to make a living and cannot afford to spend time posting full rebuttals whenever a message appears about their topic of interest. Indeed… who pays Gregory Kohs to post about Wikipedia?
According to his website Mr. Kohs works for Comcast. So, apparently Comcast pays for Mr. Kohs to complain about Wikipedia. I wonder if they work that into their budget?
According to my clock, the 40-hour work week accounts for just less than 24% of the total hours in the week. So, what we see here are (quite typical) Wikipediots uncomfortable with the rebuttals presented, so they resort to really childish and boring questions about my work-life balance.
Professor, you may also wish to further your understanding of the meaning of “ad hominem”. I haven’t attempted to negate the truth of Mr. Smith’s claims about Wikipedia by pointing out a negative characteristic or belief of Mr. Smith’s. I’ve pointed out negative characteristics about Wikipedia. You’d think a professor wouldn’t get tripped up so easily, but I guess a professor who thinks “news alerts” are some sort of subversive tool used to antagonize journalism students is likely chock-full of half-baked ideas.
gregory you seem to post during the day. does that mean you arent working during the day? i wonder what comcast would say about your internet usage at work if someone flagged them about it.
or maybe comcast really does pay you to harass blogs about wikipedia. as a comcast shareholder, i have problems with how they pay you to use your time.
Briann, I also do a lot of work for Comcast between 9:00 PM and Midnight. Tonight, I’m going over end-of-year budget and fixing up some cross-tabulations. What shall we do about that, since I’m not compensated for overtime? (Thanks for being a shareholder, by the way — sorry about the $4 slide in share price over the past 3 weeks. Say, isn’t that about how long Wikipedia’s been running their fundraising banners? Maybe there’s a correlation.)
Anyway, if you want the e-mail address of my boss so that you can tattle on me, let me know, and I’ll send it to you. That is, as long as you’re disclosing to me your full name, city, and employer. Tit for tat, right to know one’s accuser, and all that.
i was thinking a little higher than that since im only one degree of separation from gerry hassell. i dont know if you advertising your relationship with comcast combined with what appears to be an obsessive disorder with a website is doing our public image or our stock value much good (im disappointed with the share slide but im in for the long haul)
Wikipedia has some good articles that are well and comprehensively-referenced. I know because I have written some of them. Wikipedia also has some articles which are greviously slanted to one side and remain that way because they are controlled by small groups of editors who have banded together to use Wikipedia to further their own propaganda agendas. The topics that fall into the latter category may surprise you in their diversity, everything from global warming to intelligent design, to the American theme park industry (especially SeaWorld), to card counting in blackjack. Unless editors check the editing history of the article or the article’s talk page, they may not be aware that this is going on. Unfortunately, Wikipedia’s administrative system is too incompetent and discorganized to adequately address these problems, so they continue with no end in sight. Wikipedia has the potential to be great. Too bad under its current system it never will attain it.
I would like to thank “Grouchy prof”, “Youngun”, and “Briann” for demonstrating so clearly the typical pattern of staunch defenders of Wikipedia. Let me enumerate the characteristics:
(1) Using pseudonyms, rather than real names, so that by attacking the person using their real name and identity, the attacker enjoys a position of invulnerability. It’s unaccountable personal attack, just like on Wikipedia. We have no idea who “Grouchy prof” is, or who “Youngun” is, or who “Briann” is, and we don’t know where they work, and we don’t know if they publish comments on websites during office hours.
(2) While defending an encyclopedia project that purportedly champions the dissemination of “knowledge” and “freedom of thought”, when it comes to criticism of the project’s failings, they resort to tactics of blocking that knowledge and censoring that freedom of thought. Indeed, my very means of making a living has been threatened above by “Briann”, who claims to know someone who knows the President of Bank of New York Mellon, who sits on my employer’s board of directors. His bank’s share price has dropped over 35% in the past 10 months, but “Briann” thinks he will take time out of his day to see that I’m fired from my job because I express fact-based viewpoints about Wikipedia, occasionally during office hours. I wonder how Comcast EVP David Cohen manages not to draw fire for his efforts to support the Democratic Party, sometimes (gasp!) during traditional office hours. (Maybe it’s the fact that he probably works about 60 or 70 hours a week on Comcast matters, tirelessly championing the Comcast brand as it relates to public policy and corporate communications.)
(3) There’s an utter misunderstanding of what “advertising” is. I’m told that I “advertise” that I work for a particular company, when in fact, I merely occasionally publicly state where I work. I haven’t paid anyone to spread that message to promote a call to action on behalf of my employer’s brand. That would be “advertising”. Someone saying “I work at Company X” is not advertising.
So, where I believe I have exercised First Amendment rights to publish my thoughts on websites that INVITE commentary, some pseudonymous critics of mine feel that this sort of speech should be contained, shut down, and even countered with threats against the speaker’s job security.
The utterly unethical standard operating procedure of many Wikipedia-critic-bashers is EXACTLY why I feel the need to speak out.
It’s almost 9:00 AM — time to clock in at work, folks. Have a great day.
son, you appear to comment on every article ever written about wikipedia and hang out in chat rooms about it. i dont think gerry would be happy to see a collection of time-stamped links that might lead him to believe you lose focus over what appears to be some sort of obsessive disorder. because surely you dont, im sure youre a great employee. but you advertise your salary range and position on your website. most companies have standards with how employees conduct themselves publicly, especially when employees attach their employers to their online activities. dont you think gerry might find some of this to be problematic? sometimes you kids dont think about these things on the internet.
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