Nitpicking Wikipedia's Vulnerabilities

tiltowait writes "A lot of Wikipedia critics point to hypothetical situations when giving reasons for not valuing the site. Wikipedia even has a 'Replies to common objections' article set up to field these. I'd rather look at some real examples of applying the same level of scrutiny to materials often held up as the Platonic ideal of 'scholarship,' such as peer-reviewed journals, conference papers, established journalism sources, monographs, and print encyclopedias. Even these have disclaimers because they can be can be vandalized or have their reliability and accuracy questioned. As dangerous as it is to trust unverified information, it can be just as bad to make prior judgments discounting information because the source happens to be anonymous. The above examples illustrate that all materials existing along a continuum of valuable information formats. Wikipedia articles can be useful for quickly obtaining factual overviews or as a starting point to further research. But that's just one librarian's opinion. How do tech-savvy people view Wikipedia?"

Editorial control

The problem that I have had with Wikipedia is that in editing articles on which I am a recognized expert, I have had my edits and entries entirely removed by others who "feel" that these edits were somehow inappropriate, even when I referenced those entries along with results from peer reviewed journals. So, while allowing everybody to edit, there is no weighting system in place for those individuals who may, in fact, know more about a particular subject matter than others who exert their biased or uneducated editorial control.

Now, all of that said, I do really appreciate Wikipedia as like the poster stated is a good starting out point for research into a particular topic.

Re:Editorial control

"The problem that I have had with Wikipedia is that in editing articles on which I am a recognized expert, I have had my edits and entries entirely removed by others who "feel" that these edits were somehow inappropriate, even when I referenced those entries along with results from peer reviewed journals."

Wow! That sounds just like another website I frequently visit!

Re:Editorial control

This is what Larry Sanger said in his last K5 article about Wikipedia. Larry made the argument that even though he has a PhD in philosophy his articles could be corrected by a six year old. Personally, I think that if your beliefs can't stand up to the curiosity of a six year old then that says something in and of itself.

Re:Editorial control

The only thing is, who certifies? Who decides who's smart enough to be an authority, and who isn't? I've known professors who should have their work overwritten by college freshmen. Do we want those professors censoring smart people because they disagree?

I do rather like the idea of having some sort of editorial process to the wikipedia. Whenever this issue of "trustworthiness" has come up, I've always had the same hesitating suggestion: branch the wikipedia so that there's something like a "stable branch". Keep the wikipedia as it is, but it'd be nice if there were some kind of designated "editors" that could integrate the changes better, make sure the work is coherent, correct, etc. and put out the edited version as the "stable" version which would lag a bit behind from the "unstable".

Of course, such a thing would be a logistical nightmare, and it's damn near impossible. However, I think it would be appreciated by a lot of people if some editorial process could be worked in somehow.

Re:Editorial control

" The only thing is, who certifies? Who decides who's smart enough to be an authority, and who isn't?"

ummmm, the Wikipedia authors and monitors. It's perfectly possible to verify people know what they're talking about some way or another, and even if they don't and slip through the system, there will be other "certified" users who can overwrite/edit their mistakes just like 6 year olds can right now.

Re:Editorial control

I wonder which article this was. I've never had this problem at all, and I've contributed to dozens of articles, both in science (I'm a Ph.D. in astrophysics), and in politics (where I have worked on "hot button" topics like the ACLU.) I have certaintly had occasional issues with people, but it's actually quite rare. In general, contentious but well-sourced material that belongs in an article, stays in an article, and people who try to remove it are considered vandals by the community and dealt with accordingly.

Reading between the lines of your post, it seems entirely possible that your edits, even if they were sourced by peer-reviewed journals, were inappropriate for the articles you edited. Wikipedia is not meant to be a series of technical review articles. The information you added may well have been considered at an inappropriately high level, it may have just been "too much" (articles are not supposed to grow without bounds) or, indeed, you may have added too much information about only one side of a contentious topic -- in the third case, people are likely to worry that you are subverting NPOV. (Adding detail to one side of an issue but not the other is probably the most tricky aspect of wikipedia -- I personally think it's OK, but it does, reasonably, set off people's NPOV alarms.)

Re:Editorial control

nice speech, but the truth is not democratically accountable.

Re:Encyclopedia != Community

This is just bullshit.

First off, not all sides must be represented. The page on Earth doesn't talk about the "Is it flat?" controversy. Loony opinions are absolutely NOT represented on Wikipedia. That issue has come and gone many times. No one talks about Pat Robertson's side of the story on Wikipedia.

Secondly, a lot of the edits on wikipedia are done by students and faculty of academic institutions. I don't consider these people "losers" because they're contributing to our base of information. I consider them an important asset to society.

Re:Encyclopedia != Community

First, because Wikipedia is governed by a policy called NPOV, or Neutral Point Of View, which is interpreted to mean that an encyclopedia must reflect all perspectives on any subject.

Not to nitpick, but NPOV is only one of three supreme rules, the other two being No original research [wikipedia.org] and Verifiability [wikipedia]. They must be all taken together, no one trumps the other.

So, if you're an expert, add a "Sources" section with references to back you up, that prove that your statements aren't just things that you believe, but are indeed the consensus of the experts in your field. "No original research" means that, in fact, Wikipedians explicitely are NOT equiped to judge whether something is an expert consensus or not. So, as long as you back your statement up with published sources (just as you'd do in an academic paper), you should be fine.

Also, if someone reverts you, and you know you're right, don't back down. Everyone on Wikipedia needs to be both bold and civil. Go to the "discussion" part of the article, explain that you're an expert, explain that you think this is also the consensus of other experts, and if they're being civil, they'll welcome your edits with open arms.

How do tech-savvy people view Wikipedia?"

With firefox.

Nailing theses to the library door

I'm probably in the minority, being a librarian a with a good opinion of Wikipedia. Many (mostly older) librarians, for example, relish their roles as gatekeepers to information. I suppose it comes from the old warden-style approach to protecting books, or some sort of warped view of taking "information is power" as a need to hoard and protect its distribution.

There is this sometimes misguided need to teach "information literacy," with exaggerated assumptions about "kids believing everything they read online." Recent library conferences have covered this alongside how students learn and use technology -- often with the same sort of bemused condescension that 19th century anthropologists exhibited toward alien cultures. It's unnerving. But teaching others to evaluate information themselves, rather than thinking it's our job to do it for them, is on the right track. History as shown a path towards direct and open access to information, and I see wiki publishing as a direct extension of this trend.

Librarians, in general, seem stuck on the "omg you can vandalize Wikipedia so it's worthless" argument. Jimbo even got asked, at the last ALA conference, essentially, "What's to stop me from distrupting information in Wikipedia?," by a librarian. And this is the profession so disturbed by book bannings? I just don't see libraries staying relevant if we don't acknowledge the value of blogs, wikis, and other new information formats (and we're not [slashdot.org] quite [indiana.edu] there [webjunction.org] yet).

Of course, those story links are nitpicks themselves. Library stuff (if it exists on your topic) is of better quality than what you'll find via Google. As for Wikipedia, content zealots -- both snobs [wikimedia.org] and censors [wikipedia.org] -- threaten the open encyclopedia's mission at least as much as the cranks. But there's no need to exaggerate the problems of Wikipedia. Sure, it can get messy, but the benefits far outweigh the costs.

As another frontiersman was warned, "If you can't take a little bloody nose, maybe you ought to go back home and crawl under your bed. It's not safe out here. It's wondrous, with treasures to satiate desires both subtle and gross. But it's not for the timid."

So anyway, all of these comments are a bit of a hyperbolism. As a piece on peak libraries [liswiki.com] I started shows (oh yeah, that's a library science Wiki btw), I'm something of a provocateur at times. It's just that, after spending my early career trying to educate everyone that librarians are "with it" [slashdot.org], I've discovered that there's just as much of a need to convince librarians to get with the times.

More time wasting

I view it as a great way to waste time at work, mostly.

Wikipedia rocks, BUT...

I just had a similar discussion with my girlfriend this past weekend. She found some valuable information on Wikipedia for a paper she’s writing on Chinese culture. I told her she should use that as a springboard: that Wikipedia could provide her the facts and details she needs, and that she should then find independent citable sources for each individual facts. I told her that I was sure it couldn’t be cited because the information there is simply too fluid and couldn’t be counted on to remain unchanged over time. She checked with her professor who wasn’t terribly familiar with the details, but had at least heard of it. He looked into the matter and told her that it was perfectly acceptable as long as the citations were up to MLA standards. I told her that her professor would turn out to be wrong in the long run (yeah, modesty is part of my charm, why do you ask?).

So I guess I agree with the story submittor (askor?) that Wikipedia rocks, but that their model simply doesn’t lend itself the the level of credibility needed for that sort of use. It’s great, and in many ways a more valuable resource than Google, and one hell of a social experiment. But at the end of the day, you simply don’t know if any given fact was contributed by a Princeton research librarian or Karl Rove.

Re:Wikipedia rocks, BUT...

sure it couldn't be cited because the information there is simply too fluid and couldn't be counted on to remain unchanged over time.

If you're allowed to cite any other web page, why can't you cite a Wikipedia article. As long as you put the date you accessed it in the citation, what information was on the page is even less ambiguous than the webpage.

A better statement would have been...

As dangerous as it is to trust unverified information, it can be even more dangerous to trust information which has been "verified" by "experts" (especially if it's information from your 1966 set of EB's)

Sure, Wikipedia probably contains more errors than EB, but it also contains many more articles. It would be interesting to know how these ratios compare.

like a regular encyclopedia...

I view it as an excellent starting place to get some information. If I have a basic question, it'll probably be answered by the Wikipedia article. If it's a more advanced question, the article should point me to more in-depth references.

So remember, if you're adding information, try to cite a source!

I tend to be pleasantly surprised.

When I look something up in Wikipedia, I generally approach it with the assumption that I'm going to get a short, moderately informative, and probably at least somewhat mistaken article. Instead, I almost always find a well-researched and in-depth piece on whatever trivia I was looking up. It's not perfect, but I generally learn a great deal.

Yeah, I know I should stop assuming that I'm not going to get much, but I have that assumption with everything I look up online. It's just that Wikipedia gives me more pleasant surprises than most other sources.

Wikipedia Categories

Having been on Wikipedia for a long time, I'd say you can't make a blanket judgement about all of Wikipedia. At the top of Wikipedia's main page are eight master categories: "Culture | Geography | History | Mathematics | People | Science | Society | Technology". Wikipedia does a fantastic job on the Mathematics and Science categories. Wikipedia does a horrible job on the History and Society categories. Mathematics and Science categories are ones where people agree, unless there is some cross-over into the society category (global warming and whatnot) as well. As far as the Society category articles, well, in the Middle East Palestinians and Israelis are shooting at each other, and Americans and Iraqis are shooting at each other, and if that's happening there's no surprise there is disagreement over the Society (and History) category articles on Israel, Palestine, Iraq and so forth.

So that's basically it, there is a spectrum of categories from where Wikipedia works well and has reliable information (mathematics, history and technology categories) to where it is just edit wars that get worse and worse (society and history categories). Wikipedia is fairly reliable about what ideas Godel had about mathematics, Wikipedia is completely unreliable if you are interested in reading about say France's Front National or Vietnam's National Liberation Front. Wikipedia has not gotten better over the years in this regard, it has gotten worse. There are left wing wiki encyclopedias like Demopedia [democratic...ground.com], Dkosopedia [dkosopedia.com] and Anarchopedia [anarchopedia.org], and right-leaning ones like Wikinfo [wikinfo.org], and I predict over the coming years these alternative wikis will become quite large.

One recent example I can give, one guy just popped up who is accusing virtually every left-wing or liberal person in the 1950's was a Soviet spy, and by virtually everyone I mean editing hundreds of biographies and inserting that they were spies. Doing this is fine if done in the right way, but he is a bit nutty or stubborn or whatever and he has a dozen people reverting his stuff but that doesn't do much good. Then we have Lyndon Larouche followers come in as well. Or way out communists saying nutty things. Wikipedia would probably be better off if these people all went off to their own respective wikis.

Wikipedia and massive growth.

One of the things about Wikipedia is that it has become so large and vast in such a short time. Just three years ago Wikipedia only had around 50,000 articles. Last year it only had 300,000. It has grown so fast that it is now the 35th most visited website acording to alexa, and searching for Wikipedia gives over 300 million results.

Wikipedia has literally appeared out of nowhere in the context of the Internet and printed encyclopedias. It is already the most popular online reference work in terms of linkage and hits per month.

Its the fact that Wikipedia is so big, yet still relavtivley new that many people are skeptical of it, but I have been with Wikipedia for a long time and have appreciated its value, by around 2010 Wikipedia will have millions of articles, and people will have gotten used to its power. Anti vandal techniques are being developed, there is a dedicated vandal fighter program and there is now almost 600 administrators patrolling it.

Wikipedia is a monster, and it is carving out the internet. The World wide web will soon split into two webs, the Wiki web, and the Loki web.

Perfect example of a problem in Wikipedia

A few days back there was talk about the Moller Sky Car, and someone said that the Newtonian and Bernoulli theories are incompatible, citing a Wikipedia article. (I'd link it, but I have a freakin migraine and really need to get to bed...)

Well, the wikipedia article was BS. Pulling out a real text like "Fundamentals of Aerodynamics" by Anderson would confirm that the Newtonian and Bernoulli views are compatible, just two different ways of expressing the same phenomenon. But since anyone who thinks s/he knows something about something can edit a wikipedia entry we get entries like that, which spread falsehoods.

I personally avoid Wikipedia for that very reason.

I suggest to people that when they are interested in a phenomenon that they try to find a reputable website that focuses on **just** that phenomenon. For example, if you have a question in aerodynamics, look for an aero website. Et Cetera.

-everphilski-

My thoughts

(Dislaimer - I'm a wikipedia administrator, arbitrator, and the "featured article director" -- I choose the featured articles you see on the main page every day)

Last week I was a guest speaker for a group of education graduate students about Wikipedia (the course was on technology use in education; wikipedia was part of the curriculum). Before the lecture, sent them a few items I thought they should read - objective studies of Wikipedia's accuracy done by impartial, outside organization. Here's what I sent them:

----------
1) "A group of students in the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois has published a paper entitled "Information Quality Discussions in Wikipedia" (PDF format). The focus of the paper was on assessing the IQ of Wikipedia featured articles -- in this case, IQ stands for "information quality" -- when compared to other samples from the project, including featured article removal candidates, pages marked as NPOV disputes, and a selection of random pages. According to the paper, the study showed how seriously the Wikipedia project views issues of article quality. The authors concluded that as a quality standard, the featured article process "is not ideal, but it does seem relatively rigorous." They also noted that the process is not as resource-intensive as other possibilities, such as blind judging." - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_S ignpost/2005-08-01/Featured_content [wikipedia.org]
PDF of research paper can be found at: http://www.isrl.uiuc.edu/~stvilia/papers/qualWiki. pdf [uiuc.edu]

2) An article comparing the WP to Brockhaus and Encarta has appeared in issue 21/04 of C't, a major German computer engineering magazine. It is titled /Lexika: Wikipedia gegen Brockhaus und Encarta/, starting on p. 132 - http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_vs_Brockh aus_and_Encarta [wikimedia.org]
Full survey results can be found at: http://mail.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/20 04-October/035339.html [wikimedia.org]

3) "As publicly editable sites, Wikis are vulnerable to vandalism. We've examined many pages on Wikipedia that treat controversial topics, and have discovered that most have, in fact, been vandalized at some point in their history. But we've also found that vandalism is usually repaired extremely quickly--so quickly that most users will never see its effects." - IBM study of Wikipedia - http://researchweb.watson.ibm.com/history/results. htm [ibm.com]

4) Computer Science professor (and minor geek rockstar) Ed Felton (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Felten [wikipedia.org]) posted in his blog about a
small-scale survey he did of Wikipedia: http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/?p=674 [freedom-to-tinker.com]
-----------------

As far as my personal interactions - as featured article director, I can say first-hand that we've been hitting really hard on the need to have inline cited sources in the article text. It's been an explicit requirement for featured articles for some time now (9-12 months or so). In many ways, this makes our content much more trustworhty than most other information sources.

Furthermore, purely from personal experience, I can say there's something to be said for the expert-hobbyist. For example, the "best" writer on wikipedia (in terms of number of featured articles written) is a 17 year old from New Jersey [wikipedia.org] who writes long, thorough, well referenced, accurate articles on, erm, British and the Bri

Good for casual use; not for serious research

I teach freshman composition at the U of Texas in Austin. My students are about to begin their second paper, which will involve a substantial research component, and Wikipedia was one of the first things I covered in discussing acceptable sources. I do not accept citations of Wikipedia articles, for two reasons:

1) The articles are not stable. They change on a regular basis. If my students cite something, I need it to be static so that I can verify their citations easily. I am well aware that Wikipedia has a robust versioning system, but that is irrelevant to my purposes. If a student cites something and I cannot immediately locate it, I simply do not have the time to sort through the recent edits to find a version of the article that matches what my student quoted. This is particularly true of popular and frequently updated articles, where there can be dozens of recent edits to sort through. There just aren't enough hours in the day for that.

2) The sources are all too frequently anonymous. Some Wikipedia articles contain excellently documented source information, it is true; but many others do not. There is no reliable way to separate solid, documentable information from personal crank theories. Sometimes they're obvious; sometimes they're not. Some will invoke the magic of "many eyeballs make shallow bugs" at this point, pointing out that errors tend to get corrected or reverted fairly rapidly. But once again, that is irrelevant. If my student cites an unfixed "bug" to support an argument, that's just as damaging to the student's paper as it would be if the bug never got fixed.

So what I tell my students is this: Wikipedia is great for fast, informal definitions of unfamiliar material, but not for formal papers submitted for credit. You can use it as a starting point for further research -- I have used it as such a starting point myself. But every piece of information from the Wikipedia article needs to be verified against a static, identifiable source before it can be used in a paper, and then you need to cite the verifying source rather than Wikipedia.

If it makes the Wikipedia people feel better, I also refuse to accept citations of the Encyclopedia Britannica -- or any encyclopedia, for that matter. Encyclopedias provide useful overviews; but I want my students to grapple with primary sources, not secondary summaries.

Re:Good for casual use; not for serious research

This has a rather painfully simple technical solution. Just demand that your students cite specific version of an article by URL. For example, the *current* article on Slashdot at Wikipedia is:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Slashdot &oldid=24939679 [wikipedia.org]

Someone will probably modify the Slashdot article itself in the next five minutes. But the URL I give will retain unchanged forever. Of course, if the edit someone does in five minutes improves the information, my snapshot URL won't present the improvement. But then the future improvement isn't what your students read either.

I just love it

As a kid who grew up reading encyclopedias and dictionaries for pleasure by the hour, I think it's like a playground. I can be reading about quantum chromodynamics or something, and three links later I can be reading about the Livery Companies of London, or French Impressionism, or linguistics, or the Luminiferous Aether. This is exactly what the World Wide Web is supposed to be about. I'm 50 now, I can't imagine what my life would be like if I'd had this when I was 12. I used to read a newspaper column where a regular filler bit was something about "things I found out today while looking up other things". That's exactly how I feel about Wikipedia.

Do I take everything I read there seriously? No, no more (or less) so than I take what The Wall Street Journal or The New York Times has to say. After all their authors are anonymous to me, and I frequently diagree with their facts or intrepretations.

How could anyone possibly deface wikipedia?

"Who cares if it's easy to deface, it's got great moderation!"

Swift (and not so swift) moderation doesn't do very much good. A friend added me to a list of famous erotic authors. It was removed.. a few weeks later. Get what? I (Aaron Gyes) am still, months later, all over the damn internet.

http://www.answers.com/topic/list-of-authors-of-er otic-works [answers.com]
http://www.absoluteastronomy.com/encyclopedia/l/li /list_of_authors_of_erotic_works.htm [absoluteastronomy.com]
http://encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com/List%20o f%20authors%20of%20erotic%20works [thefreedictionary.com]
http://www.biologydaily.com/biology/List_of_erotic _authors [biologydaily.com]
http://psychcentral.com/psypsych/List_of_erotic_au thors [psychcentral.com]
http://web.linix.ca/pedia/index.php/List_of_erotic _authors [linix.ca]
http://www.europe.com/index.php/List_of_authors_of _erotic_works [europe.com]
http://www.medicalrace.com/dictionary/List_of_erot ic_authors [medicalrace.com]
http://www.dictionaryofeverything.com/explore/112/ List_of_authors_of_erotic_works.html [dictionary...ything.com]
http://list-of-authors-of-erotic-works.iqnaut.net/ [iqnaut.net]
http://www.omnipelagos.com/entry?n=list_of_authors _of_erotic_works [omnipelagos.com]
http://www.gardeningdaily.com/flowers-and-plants/L ist_of_erotic_authors [gardeningdaily.com]
http://www.braindex.com/encyclopedia/index.php/Lis t_of_erotic_authors [braindex.com]
http://en.efactory.pl/List_of_erotic_authors [efactory.pl]
http://www.art-fresh.net/DisplayArticleFull314102. html [art-fresh.net]
http://www.thefreeencyclopedia.com/definition/word .aspx?w=List_of_erotic_authors [thefreeencyclopedia.com]
http://bigpedia.com/encyclopedia/List_of_authors_o f_erotic_works [bigpedia.com]
http://www.dogluvers.com/dog_breeds/List_of_erotic _authors [dogluvers.com]