Wikipedia Warning for Student Scholars

nHumanities loves Wikipedia. In fact, we speed-dial it from our browser with a little search engine plug-in. Student scholars, however, need to approach Wikipedia with caution and use it appropriately . . . which means not at all in formal research papers.

Wikipedia is a free online encyclopedia that is built on the theory that the community is smarter than any one of us alone. Anyone can write, revise, or edit a Wikipedia encyclopedia article and articles are anonymous. That's the problem: there's no way to judge the credibility, authority, and reliability of a Wikipedia article, unless the reader already knows something about the subject.

If you're not familiar with wikis, you will enjoy looking at Marshall Brain's explanation at Howstuffworks. As he says,

The only reason that a wiki works is because the community of people who work on it make it work. The community adds all of the content, edits everything and polices the content to root out problems. When the community is functioning well, it can produce a tremendous amount of content that gets better and better over time.

But when the community is not working well, the result can be inaccurate, one-sided, or--sometimes--maliciously misleading information. Earlier this month, Wikipedia's credibility came into question when some spoof entries were uncovered. On the other hand, a recent study by Nature magazine which compared the quality of science article entries between Wikipedia and Encyclopedia Britannica found that "the difference in accuracy was not particularly great":

Only eight serious errors, such as misinterpretations of important concepts, were detected in the pairs of articles reviewed, four from each encyclopaedia. But reviewers also found many factual errors, omissions or misleading statements: 162 and 123 in Wikipedia and Britannica, respectively. ("Internet Encyclopaedias Go Head to Head")

Student researchers should not hesitate to use either Wikipedia or the Encyclopedia Britannica to get an overview of a topic; neither, however, is an especially good source for a formal research paper. Students make a novice's mistake when they rely almost exclusively on Wikipedia for their research--that's just plain lazy or ill-informed. Remember that the library provides fabulous, free online resources.

Interesting links:

• NPR's Talk of the Nation: Wikipedia, Open Source and the Future of the Web
• Wikipedia's page on External Peer Review
• USA Today: A False Wikipedia 'Biography'
• Salon.com (AP): Man Apologizes After Fake Wikipedia Post
• NPR's Talk of the Nation: Wikipedia to Require Contributors to Register
  
• Guardian Unlimited: Can You Trust Wikipedia?
  

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See follow-up blog entry dated 26Mar06. --ms.dsk
See Wikipedia & Wikiality dated 03Aug06. --ms.dsk