Wikipedia or wickedpedia?
John Hobbins posts on Wikipedia and observes:
According to a recent survey by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, 8% of online Americans consult Wikipedia on a typical day. That is huge. 50% of college-degree holding internet users report that they turn to the site for their research needs.
Considering how many people use Wikipedia, the stakes are high. Scholars may look down their noses at online research all they want. Whether they like it or not, the future is online, and for many, the future is already here.
He draws a predictable response from Jim West who positively loathes Wikipedia. An earlier defence of Wikipedia by Mark Goodacre also drew Jim’s ire. I’m not aware that Jim ever took up Mark’s challenge:
Here’s my challenge for Jim, which will help us to test the academic value of Wikipedia. I suggest that he goes to the Wikipedia article on Zwingli, find all the errors and correct them, add any additional important information, and then monitor it over the next twelve months to see whether any Tom, Dick or Harry comes in and spoils his work, and, if so, how straightforward it will be to make further adjustments.
I’d just want to make the following observations:
- Wikipedia is here. Deal with it.
- It will be many people’s first port of call. Many (most?) of these are unlikely to be either academics or people researching term papers or essays. The question is whether scholars are happy just to turn up their noses at the dreadfully ignorant browsing habits of the hoi polloi, and the awfully unreliable common nature of Wiki projects (NB to my US readers, this is irony), or whether they are, as John says, roll up their sleeves and get stuck in. Notably Wikipedia is far more reliable in practice than it ought to be according to theory.
- When students quote Wikipedia in essays, without any other supporting sources, they should be guided to proper use of research tools and methods, for which Wikipedia can nonetheless be a useful jumping-off point. John’s proposal is to create a site to which they can jump with some sense that what they find there will be academically credible. What’s so bad about that?
- People are lazy. Easy information is the most accessible information. If we can’t make good information accessible, people will go with bad information. Not everyone on the web is trying to be a research student, or has the toolkit to know how to set about it.
- If scholars care about disseminating knowledge, teaching and learning, then they need to make that accessible. If they simply want to be a new high priesthood, initiating a select few into the arcane mysteries of scholarship, they can easily keep themselves pure and undefiled by the world of Wikipedia. But however much they anathematize it, it will still be there, and still be visited, used, edited, quoted and abused.
- Wikipedia is here. Deal with it.
Update
(17/07/07, 09:15 See Mark Goodacre’s helpful new post on this topic.)
July 17th, 2007 at 7:12 pm
What is the substance of the question here? If Wikipedia is the only source used, then I would agree that there is a huge problem. If students are using it as the place where an interpretation of the argument is summarised and other sources are referenced, then use it. All of us students (disciples?) do well to check our sources and references; if we are postmodernists then “truth”, like our credit card, can be our flexible friend; if we are rooted in a dogmatic tradition, exegetical life is so much easier. Educationalists may qualify what I say here, however, informal comment from some teachers I know suggests that there is a significant lack of the grasp of conceptual thinking and reasoning and use of logical process in argument. In other words, students have been prepared, sponge-like, to believe much of what they have been told and not how to test what is put before them.
Lest pride develop, I turn to the philosopher and former newspaper editor, Tony Livesey. In his days heading up “The Sport” he dismissed all “Guardian” readers for reading it in order to be told what to believe. Reflect a moment. It is easy to slip into a mode that accepts that which is placed before us as being authoritative because it feeds us as we wish to be fed. Wikipedia may to that for students, but so can David Bosch, Walter Brueggemann and the other heroes of our various traditions for us if we allow them uncritically to control rather than command our attention.
The question that students, and we as disciples of a journey of faith, do well to address is to discern the value of having an open mind in order to know when to close it firmly on that which for us is truth to be believed. For me, that is the substance of the question.