wikipedia woes and lies

The debate over the legitimacy of Wikipedia continues with an endorsement of an article that presents findings from yet another article.

So did the Gang of 500 actually write Wikipedia? Wales decided to run a simple study to find out: he counted who made the most edits to the site. "I expected to find something like an 80-20 rule: 80% of the work being done by 20% of the users, just because that seems to come up a lot. But it's actually much, much tighter than that: it turns out over 50% of all the edits are done by just .7% of the users … 524 people. … And in fact the most active 2%, which is 1400 people, have done 73.4% of all the edits." The remaining 25% of edits, he said, were from "people who [are] contributing … a minor change of a fact or a minor spelling fix … or something like that."

This entire piece is a red herring if to de-legitimate Wikipedia. As I have said repeatedly, the research that studies the accuracy of Wikipedia continues to conclude that the accuracy is on target and improving. The point is that a peer-reviewed article and an encyclopedia entry serve different purposes and those purposes should not be confused. If students are using Wikipedia instead of peer-reviewed sources it is not a problem with Wikipedia, it is a problem with information literacy. I would also assert that the blogosphere is perhaps more of the problem than Wikipedia in these various blog-based claims level to de-legitimate Wikipedia!

The “nuts in the credibility system” is a myth that demands evidence before it deserves an audience. The evidence has only been counter-factual to this claim thus far. Who does the editing is irrelevant if the content is accurate and so, this “study” is also irrelevant. Those who are concerned about “outsiders” have different power and control issues than the use of wikipedia as a replacement for Britannica in my judgment. It’s important to clarify and make distinct these issues but “research” as this article describes only confuses and conflates those issues in a bad way.

The final irony is that this "most helpful analysis" is coming from non-refereed sources through various blog postings. It has no more legitimacy than the very articles that are held to be suspect by their own dodging of traditional media filters. To de-legitimate a source based on the ad hominem that supposed "freaks" are doing the editing is non-sequitur hogwash. It betrays the use of actual data to do a comparative analysis of accuracy. Those studies have demonstrated that Wikipedia is not a bad encyclopaedic source. To ignore these data in one's own political assertions that Wikipedia somehow makes people dumber and destroys the sacred boundaries of the academy is perhaps worse than the assertions themselves. This is especially true and ironic when said assertions are only adding to the problem of non-refereed sources in the blogosphere that will undoubtedly confuse rather than help people do research.

Bloggers who say that Wikipedia is an horrific source that obscures truth and promotes bad information need to do two things for said assertions to have any legitimacy.

1. Explain why the data that suggest a high correspondence of accuracy in articles to other encyclopaedic sources is somehow wrong or flawed (which is the responsible academic approach to construct any argument).
2. Explain how posting the incredulity of Wikipedia on a blog is not an example of the very problem made by such assertions to de-legitimate Wikipedia. OR, explain why it is not actually worse since it does not allow for edits unless the publisher allows it. Blogs can be (and perhaps often are) hotbeds of lies and bad information with absolutely no information filters at all!

Until then the issue must be how to teach students the best ways to use the Web for research. Wikipedia is a solid entry point and nothing more. Blogs may be appropriate entry points, but nothing more. Periodicals like broadsheets are also good entry points. Peer-reviewed articles explain various positions on data that others have made and the process itself legitimates the claims as reliable. Accessing the core data sets or collecting your own data to compare to others' findings is the most rigorous in concert with legitimate theories or arguments. I recommend this process for making asserting that Wikipedia is for dummies or that it makes dummies before making said claims.

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