Return to What Is Wikipedia ... And How Does It Treat History?
Wikipedia is a particularly heinous form of internet misinformation; it is very popular and its owners, users, and contributors have created an aura of undeserving legitimacy about it by arguing that Wikipedia tends to be less biased because of its democratic nature. While the site also admits weaknesses related to that same strength (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Researching_with_Wikipedia--note: this "research guide" is in a rather hard-to-find FAQ), from personal experience, I can attest that hard-core Wikipedia users are more likely to tout Wikipedia's accuracy and neutrality than confess its drawbacks.
It has been commonplace for persons in the media to comment upon today's youth's cynicism and questioning attitudes; this theory, however, is not borne out when seeing how willy-nilly students use websites. In addition to requiring students to obtain my written permission for any website used for a paper, I also now have to specially point out Wikipedia as website that students should *not* use for any type of study or research purposes. Here is just an illustration of the problems Wikipedia presents. I can contribute an "article" to Wikipedia in my specialty as Ph.D. student in American history; it might be the most well-researched, documented, accurate article on a particular topic the website has seen, but 5 minutes after submitting it, a 10 year old without any knowledge on that topic for any reason whatsoever anywhere around the world could edit that article. He or she could edit anything from my prose to the facts contained within the article itself. Unless I was willing to keep a close eye on the article, the article might stay as the 10 year old edited it, if the topic wasn't one in which many people were interested. Only if the 10 year old made a blatant error--like changing the American Civil War to occur in the 20th century or committed what Wikipedians call "vandalism" and inserted profanity etc. might an "edit" like that come to the attention of site administrators. This is illustrative of another point--the people who have the skills to write the best articles for an encyclopedia will not contribute to Wikipedia because there is no incentive to do so when anyone can change your article.
In universities Wikipedia may be causing more damage than just providing bad information. I had a plagiarism case in which a student copied verbatim phrases from a Wikipedia article. After the evidence was shown to the student, the offending phrases "disappeared"--that is they were edited out of the article. A novice user of Wikipedia will not know a few important things about the source which could help in this case: 1) the "history" of an article (previous versions) do not show up in search engines 2) previous versions are, however, still available on the Wikipedia site and 3) Wikipedia articles are copied all over the internet onto other sites. Out of luck and persistence, I was able to find the original article with the offending sentences on another site even though at that point, as a newbie to the site, I was unaware that "histories" were available on Wikipedia's site.
I'm not sure if academics realize how popular Wikipedia is; often, if one "googles" a topic, a Wikipedia article on that topic will be the first to come up in the search results, and therefore most likely for an internet user to click on. There has not been enough from the media but also from scholars whose role it is to expose questionable resources about how much Wikipedia is mis-educating its users. Much more needs to be written about this source--and a in much clearer, decisive style.
It has been commonplace for persons in the media to comment upon today's youth's cynicism and questioning attitudes; this theory, however, is not borne out when seeing how willy-nilly students use websites. In addition to requiring students to obtain my written permission for any website used for a paper, I also now have to specially point out Wikipedia as website that students should *not* use for any type of study or research purposes. Here is just an illustration of the problems Wikipedia presents. I can contribute an "article" to Wikipedia in my specialty as Ph.D. student in American history; it might be the most well-researched, documented, accurate article on a particular topic the website has seen, but 5 minutes after submitting it, a 10 year old without any knowledge on that topic for any reason whatsoever anywhere around the world could edit that article. He or she could edit anything from my prose to the facts contained within the article itself. Unless I was willing to keep a close eye on the article, the article might stay as the 10 year old edited it, if the topic wasn't one in which many people were interested. Only if the 10 year old made a blatant error--like changing the American Civil War to occur in the 20th century or committed what Wikipedians call "vandalism" and inserted profanity etc. might an "edit" like that come to the attention of site administrators. This is illustrative of another point--the people who have the skills to write the best articles for an encyclopedia will not contribute to Wikipedia because there is no incentive to do so when anyone can change your article.
In universities Wikipedia may be causing more damage than just providing bad information. I had a plagiarism case in which a student copied verbatim phrases from a Wikipedia article. After the evidence was shown to the student, the offending phrases "disappeared"--that is they were edited out of the article. A novice user of Wikipedia will not know a few important things about the source which could help in this case: 1) the "history" of an article (previous versions) do not show up in search engines 2) previous versions are, however, still available on the Wikipedia site and 3) Wikipedia articles are copied all over the internet onto other sites. Out of luck and persistence, I was able to find the original article with the offending sentences on another site even though at that point, as a newbie to the site, I was unaware that "histories" were available on Wikipedia's site.
I'm not sure if academics realize how popular Wikipedia is; often, if one "googles" a topic, a Wikipedia article on that topic will be the first to come up in the search results, and therefore most likely for an internet user to click on. There has not been enough from the media but also from scholars whose role it is to expose questionable resources about how much Wikipedia is mis-educating its users. Much more needs to be written about this source--and a in much clearer, decisive style.
Re: Scholars must counteract influence of wikipedia
(#49437)
by Andrew D. Todd on December 26, 2004 at 9:08 AM
by Andrew D. Todd on December 26, 2004 at 9:08 AM
In the first place, wiki-copying is only one source of plagiarism. Fraternities have kept files of stuff since time immemorial. Let the professionals at Turn-It-In worry about finding the sources of plagiarism (unless, of course, you want to make a profession of it yourself). A blanket announcement about the existence of Turn-It-In should be enough to make your point in undergraduate classes.
http://www.turnitin.com/
Here is a specimen notice. Regard the fine ambiguity of language:
http://www.alfred.edu/its/resource/2004/turnitin/turnitin.html
Here is a student protest letter dealing with Turn-It-In:
http://www.sa.uts.edu.au/thirddegree/spring2003/plagiarism.html
In a larger sense, I suspect that the tendency of the internet is to force college faculty to confront their customary self-delusions about the nature of students. If you succeed in stamping out plagiarism, students may very well start paying more attention to the writing requirements when choosing courses-- and make a beeline for the course with true-false exams graded on the curve. In an organization the size of a university, there will always be someone who is willing to grade easy.
http://www.turnitin.com/
Here is a specimen notice. Regard the fine ambiguity of language:
http://www.alfred.edu/its/resource/2004/turnitin/turnitin.html
Here is a student protest letter dealing with Turn-It-In:
http://www.sa.uts.edu.au/thirddegree/spring2003/plagiarism.html
In a larger sense, I suspect that the tendency of the internet is to force college faculty to confront their customary self-delusions about the nature of students. If you succeed in stamping out plagiarism, students may very well start paying more attention to the writing requirements when choosing courses-- and make a beeline for the course with true-false exams graded on the curve. In an organization the size of a university, there will always be someone who is willing to grade easy.
Re: Scholars must counteract influence of wikipedia
(#49449)
by Jonathan Dresner on December 26, 2004 at 1:59 PM
by Jonathan Dresner on December 26, 2004 at 1:59 PM
The point is not that wiki is the primary source of plagiarism, but that wiki's myth of reliability creates complacency among students untrained in proper secondary source use. Whether it's plagiarism or just citations, wiki is taken way too seriously.
Re: Scholars must counteract influence of wikipedia
(#49462)
by Andrew D. Todd on December 27, 2004 at 8:00 AM
by Andrew D. Todd on December 27, 2004 at 8:00 AM
To: Jonathan Dresner
I'm going to ask you to answer a big question: should there be encyclopedias?
The 1911 Britannica is sometimes called "The Scholar's Britannica." It was the last general encyclopedia to make a plausible claim of intellectual legitimacy. Subsequent editions of the Britannica deteriorated, as the old material was weeded out to make room for new, and the new material failed to command a comparable sense of authority. New encyclopedias did not recapture this authority. The World Book Encyclopedia and Comptons were simply mediocre. As for the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, it may or may not be the prototype for Orwell's "Ministry of Truth." Encyclopedias were customarily sold by the worst kind of door-to-door salesmen. I have in front of me a little three-volume paperback encyclopedia vended by Time Magazine in 1982. It was a repackaging of the Concord Desk Encyclopedia, or University Desk Encyclopedia. I looked "Physiocrats" up in this, and found that the compilers seemed to have confused the Physiocrats with Henry George. This is the sort of error which might be made by someone who knew nothing at all about the Physiocrats, but hastily started rewriting the entry from the 1911 Britannica, using it as a royalty-free starting point for a new encyclopedia. By comparison, the Wiki entry is a beau ideal. When, in the 1990's, Microsoft came to produce a CD-ROM encyclopedia, it did not recruit a board of editors. Instead, Microsoft bought the rights to a cheap children's encyclopedia, one which had no popular following, a kind of remainder book at the corporate level. Microsoft then employed recent college graduates to cut the thing down to about half of its original length in order to make room for video clips and suchlike. Wiki is an attempt to revive the general or universal encyclopedia from a century's decline and fall. If it fails, there is no alternative candidate.
Twentieth century encyclopedists produced specialist encyclopedias, thousands of them, limited in scope by what a single chief editor could know. When I talk about the limitations of Wiki, I am ultimately comparing it against the relevant specialist encyclopedia, for example, the International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (1968, 17 vols.), which is very strong on miscellaneous "isms," such as the Physiocrats. It is available in university libraries, or, if you want your own set, the going rate on Bookfinder seems to be somewhere around $200-300. A "follow-on" edition has been produced, with an electronic version, (see the entry in the Harvard library website), but that is not freely available. The going rate for the paper version is about $9000-$10,000.
http://www.bookfinder.com/
http://lib.harvard.edu/e-resources/details/i/iesbsxxx.html
This is an illustration of what is wrong with copyright. A work which was overwhelmingly funded with government money, at a whole series of levels, ought to be in the public domain thirty-five years after it was written, but that is not the case.
I'm going to ask you to answer a big question: should there be encyclopedias?
The 1911 Britannica is sometimes called "The Scholar's Britannica." It was the last general encyclopedia to make a plausible claim of intellectual legitimacy. Subsequent editions of the Britannica deteriorated, as the old material was weeded out to make room for new, and the new material failed to command a comparable sense of authority. New encyclopedias did not recapture this authority. The World Book Encyclopedia and Comptons were simply mediocre. As for the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, it may or may not be the prototype for Orwell's "Ministry of Truth." Encyclopedias were customarily sold by the worst kind of door-to-door salesmen. I have in front of me a little three-volume paperback encyclopedia vended by Time Magazine in 1982. It was a repackaging of the Concord Desk Encyclopedia, or University Desk Encyclopedia. I looked "Physiocrats" up in this, and found that the compilers seemed to have confused the Physiocrats with Henry George. This is the sort of error which might be made by someone who knew nothing at all about the Physiocrats, but hastily started rewriting the entry from the 1911 Britannica, using it as a royalty-free starting point for a new encyclopedia. By comparison, the Wiki entry is a beau ideal. When, in the 1990's, Microsoft came to produce a CD-ROM encyclopedia, it did not recruit a board of editors. Instead, Microsoft bought the rights to a cheap children's encyclopedia, one which had no popular following, a kind of remainder book at the corporate level. Microsoft then employed recent college graduates to cut the thing down to about half of its original length in order to make room for video clips and suchlike. Wiki is an attempt to revive the general or universal encyclopedia from a century's decline and fall. If it fails, there is no alternative candidate.
Twentieth century encyclopedists produced specialist encyclopedias, thousands of them, limited in scope by what a single chief editor could know. When I talk about the limitations of Wiki, I am ultimately comparing it against the relevant specialist encyclopedia, for example, the International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (1968, 17 vols.), which is very strong on miscellaneous "isms," such as the Physiocrats. It is available in university libraries, or, if you want your own set, the going rate on Bookfinder seems to be somewhere around $200-300. A "follow-on" edition has been produced, with an electronic version, (see the entry in the Harvard library website), but that is not freely available. The going rate for the paper version is about $9000-$10,000.
http://www.bookfinder.com/
http://lib.harvard.edu/e-resources/details/i/iesbsxxx.html
This is an illustration of what is wrong with copyright. A work which was overwhelmingly funded with government money, at a whole series of levels, ought to be in the public domain thirty-five years after it was written, but that is not the case.
Re: Scholars must counteract influence of wikipedia
(#134430)
by Dalek Dukat on May 21, 2009 at 9:36 PM
by Dalek Dukat on May 21, 2009 at 9:36 PM
" can contribute an "article" to Wikipedia in my specialty as Ph.D. student in American history; it might be the most well-researched, documented, accurate article on a particular topic the website has seen, but 5 minutes after submitting it, a 10 year old without any knowledge on that topic for any reason whatsoever anywhere around the world could edit that article. He or she could edit anything from my prose to the facts contained within the article itself. Unless I was willing to keep a close eye on the article, the article might stay as the 10 year old edited it, if the topic wasn't one in which many people were interested. Only if the 10 year old made a blatant error--like changing the American Civil War to occur in the 20th century or committed what Wikipedians call "vandalism" and inserted profanity etc. might an "edit" like that come to the attention of site administrators. This is illustrative of another point--the people who have the skills to write the best articles for an encyclopedia will not contribute to Wikipedia because there is no incentive to do so when anyone can change your article."
This is true of Wikipedia as a whole. They do the exact same thing with adult industry performers: http://forum.adultdvdtalk.com/forum/topic.dlt/topic_id=112336/forum_id=1/cat_id=1/112336.htm
They also maliciously publish performers' real names.
This is true of Wikipedia as a whole. They do the exact same thing with adult industry performers: http://forum.adultdvdtalk.com/forum/topic.dlt/topic_id=112336/forum_id=1/cat_id=1/112336.htm
They also maliciously publish performers' real names.
Return to What Is Wikipedia ... And How Does It Treat History?
by Lisa Roy Vox on December 20, 2004 at 8:01 PM