Common Knowledge

by Cliopatria

My sense of the discussion of citing Wikipedia as a source is that a) the subject's largely exhausted; but, b) perhaps too quickly, it assumes agreement about what needs to be documented in a undergraduate research paper or, even, a dissertation. At AHA Today, an undergraduate who signs himself"Robert" writes (28 January, 12:51 PM):"My personal policy on the citing of wikipedia is that I will cite it when I would cite a typical ency[c]lopedia, if I need a date/name/place or some other basic and established fact." My sense is that that is precisely when you don't need to cite any source.

That is to say that you don't need to cite a source for" common knowledge." If a matter is beyond dispute, established fact, citing a source unnecessarily clutters research with useless citations. The problem for students, I think, is how to know what common knowledge is. Common knowledge is not what everybody knows about a subject. It isn't that because most people know nearly nothing about most things. I, for example, have no common knowledge about quantum physics.

Common knowledge, then, is what people know about a subject who actually know about that subject. And that is, I think, where the question of encyclopedias and wikipedias comes in. Where does a student begin to find out what the common knowledge is about a subject? Both are useful for that purpose, I think; but neither is reliable beyond dispute. So, a student may be well-advised to begin by looking at both. By comparing what they say, a student can get a pretty good sense of what the common knowledge is about a subject.

My sense is that there is only one major exception to my advise to"Robert" that you do not need to cite a source for"a date/name/place or some other basic and established fact." That would be when you discover information that substantially challenges or contravenes"basic and established fact." There is no need, for example, to cite a source for the fact that Martin Luther King, Jr.'s father was named Michael King at birth and was known as the Reverend Michael, Mike or M. L. King when MLK, Jr., was born. Everybody who knows about that subject knows that. But if you uncover information that challenges that fact in some way, then you'd have to cite a source for it.

Beyond that, of course, all of us should cite our sources of particular obligation for a narrative thread or the interpretation of our information. At that point, however, we should be well beyond the common knowledge of encyclopedias and wikipedias in obligation and moving into territory that is much more interesting.

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More Comments:

Ralph E. Luker - 2/4/2007

Yes. I don't substantially disagree with Sage Ross about citations when he is writing for Wikipedia. There, it seems to me, he attempts to establish what _is_ common knowledge of a subject and the rules for acknowledgement there may be substantially different than the rules for an undergraduate or graduate research paper or dissertation.

Rebecca Anne Goetz - 2/4/2007

I tell my students to use Wikipedia in conjunction with one or two other respected print encyclopedias or biographical dictionaries. So, if someone is reading about Sir William Berkeley, he can look Virginia's longest-serving governor up in Wikipedia, the DNB, and perhaps the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography or also the Dictionary of Virginia Biography.

I also tell my students that they need not cite anything that appears in substantially the same way in three or more sources. So something like Berkeley's birthdate, place of birth, or the name of his estate, which are all well-established and listed correctly in all of the above resources, becomes then a "commonly-known fact" and does not need to be cited.

But if a student writes that Berkeley was almost single-handedly responsible for the emergence of Virginia as a successful colony, he damn well better cite Warren Billing's superb biography of the Governor.

I think you're right, Ralph--this discussion does seem to hinge on varied understandings of when material needs to be cited. I think that's what bothered me most about Middlebury's ban: what good does it do to ban students from citing Wikipedia when students could be learning how to use a reference work and a work of historical interpretation differently??

William Harshaw - 2/3/2007

I concur, although I don't write academically. It seems to me the question is who is your audience--a 45-year old associate professor in the field or someone else? The someone else might be someone just entering the field, someone surfing from a related field, or someone who's retired after a career who's now returning to an interest he or she had in college. If you're writing only for the professor, fine. If you're trying to help someone else, putting in wikipedia links (assuming a publication on-line) is a useful courtesy.

Sage Ross - 2/3/2007

The way I use Wikipedia citations academic writing is the same way I use wikilinks when writing for Wikipedia. That is, I cite Wikipedia for tangential exposition that is well-established but that I don't expect the audience to necessarily know. It's common knowledge to me, but probably not to the reader, so them to Wikipedia as a more accessible point of entry than (for example) the secondary literature where I original learned it. (This is similar to the philosophy of Wikipedia citation described in the recent NYT piece on WP citations in legal decisions.)