badblog

Sorry, but Wikipedia is a hot button for me, here comes the rant....

As an instructor of an undergraduate class, I gotta say it - Wikipedia is evil, the beginning of the end of civilization, Apocalypse City, man. Okay, maybe not that bad, but it sure as heck is NOT a trusted information source! You would not believe the sort of stuff I've seen students hand in over the past several years ("But it was on Wikipedia, it MUST be right!")

Wikipedia facilitates input from everyone to help define encyclopedic descriptions / entries; everyone has equal weighting in their say. This is a good thing, right? Complete egalitarianism. Problem is, however much it offends our sensibilities, knowledge is not egalitarian. If it were, universities wouldn't exist. Knowledge comes from education and experience. Am I saying that only the university educated and 'experts' have the right to contribute to the overall collection of knowledge? Don't bother going there, didn't say that, never would. But consider this, are you going to ask someone who's untrained to re-wire your house? Fix the brakes on your car? Remove your appendix? No? Then why trust their description of how to do it on Wikipedia? Bottom line is that not everyone's knowledge on a subject is equal. And an entity setting itself up as a source of knowledge had better take some steps to ensure that it's delivering knowledge, and not opinion.

There's also the issue of potential misuse of Wikipedia. Corporations have changed Wikipedia entries to more favorably reflect on their products, recent presidential campaign workers have begun 'adjusting' the biographies of both their candidates and those of the opposition, etc. Jon Stewart of The Daily Show on Comedy Central, prior to hosting Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, went onto the site and successfully edited several entries (including, I believe, the definition of 'elephant') multiple times over a week before the entry was locked out.

Yes, Wikipedia does some remedial editing and they've more recently taken some steps to fact check, tag multiple editors and assign the source of some edits. But they also set themselves up as a source of knowledge prior to doing any of this. Sorry if I'm considered a killjoy here, but I happen to think that checking the veracity of an item might be something you want to consider BEFORE you put it out for the world to consider as fact...

Does all this mean Wikis are bad? Nope, they're part of the Internet, just electrons, they can't be bad or good. Just means that they have to be prepared, read, and interpreted appropriately (like all of the rest of the technologies we've discussed here). For extension, I can see a multitude of uses for Wikis, both internally and as an outreach tool. In my own field, discussions on pest management would be greatly facilitated if users could refine management schemes/tactics, or build a compendium of MN insect, weed and disease pests, what they've seen, what the symptoms are, what the appropriate control tactics might be.

So, be sure that you use the power wisely, for good instead of evil.....