On:
I have informed my students that they may no longer use Wikipedia as a reference or source on papers in my courses. I urge you to consider a similar statement. While Wikipedia may be a useful first step in seeking information, I no longer accept it as a credible source. Therefore, I advise students to look further when a project requires a reliable source.
And:
- Compounding the above point is the fact that Wikipedia's quality assurance mechanism only works on a macro-level. We have little information about whether individual articles have been properly vetted by many users at a specific point. We end up deciding in general whether we believe the mechanism works or not.
I agree that a lot of the articles on Wikipedia are not great. As a reference tool, Wikipedia is interesting but not necessarily authoritative. Sure. Recently I've been discovering Wikipedia, and my thoughts had run in a different direction. Has anyone integrated Wikipedia into their courses, not as a source, but as a destination? Are there courses out there where students are being asked to *update* Wikipedia? (Wikipedia's quality assurance mechanism -- talking things out, seeking intervention, going to third party arbitrators -- assumes the possibility of rational resolution and is hard to understand besides. It needs a lot of work, particularly in having people produce concise guides making what's already there more readily understandable. Still, that doesn't mean it need be dismissed as a "brute force" approach! Something more is going on there, I think.)
- One common tool that people use to make decisions about information quality is authorship. But in the name of promoting the commons-authorship model, Wikipedia actually obscures the notion of the author at an individual level. If you wanted to find out who wrote an individual piece an article, there would be no reasonable way to do that.
It's true that wading into page histories can be time-consuming. But it's not *that* bad. Whether it is based on the other things they have written on Wikipedia or on their choice to stitch the Wikipedia identity to a real-world one, though, the reputation mechanism is still around -- though less foregrounded. If making the reputation mechanism more prominent would help Wikipedia, there are probably ways to do so within the existing structure. An individual could draft the article (or major changes to it), make the edit on Wikipedia, and leave a link on the Discussion page to the frozen version that that person had written -- allowing people to identify the author and consult it directly. The converse is true, too: the MediaWiki package makes it easy to gather links to all of one's edits on a single page. In fact, one could create an off-site list of "trusted authors" and the articles they had written, or edited, etc. Heck, I wonder what would happen if a group of academics decided to produce an encyclopedia and publish its results on Wikipedia -- and, simultaneously elsewhere, either online or in paper. The two sets of articles would gradually diverge. Third parties could decide which, if either, they wanted to consider authoritative. Sorry to natter on. I do understand that the original point was much smaller, ie to keep students thinking about the quality of their sources, and I agree with most of what's been said. Still, I can't help but think that Wikipedia is much more interesting as an opportunity. cheers Bram