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March 6, 2005
situating Wikipedia
Posted by danah boyd
I continue to get painted as anti-Wikipedia which couldn’t be further from the truth. I want to clarify a few things and i think that the latest BoingBoing entry on Wikipedia helps.
It is presumed that the data contained in a dictionary is ‘true’ but scholars have pointed out that there are ‘inaccuracies.’ There are two issues at play here. First concerns the truth-value of any record - when is there truth and when is only interpretation possible? I’ll leave that one alone for now. The better question concerns who has the authority to say whether or not something is ‘true’ where truth refers to presumed collective knowledge. The article that BoingBoing cites tells us explicitly that it is ‘scholars’ that have such authority.
Herein lies my primary complaint with Wikipedia - the lack of known authorship. (Note: i have the same problem with encyclopedias and dictionaries too, but i don’t see the Wikipedia arguments as boiled down to paper references vs. digital references.) I want to know that what part of the Wikipedia entry the Jane Austen scholar wrote and what was edited out by others. I want to know that the Jane Austen scholar looked at the entry that a 14 year old wrote and thought it was perfect. I want to know the investment level of the authors. I don’t think i’m alone on this one.
Secondly, i may be a scaredy-cat but i’m not afraid of Wikipedia. Like Clay, i firmly believe that students should cite their sources; nothing is more gut-wrenching than throwing a line of someone’s paper into Google and finding it on the web. My concern with academic citation is metaphorically concerned with citing Cliffnotes. Don’t tell me what Wikipedia tells you about Benjamin’s essay - tell me what Benjamin says and tell me your critique. If you want to use a third party’s critique to contend with, great, but that’s rarely what students do. Wikipedia’s interpretation may or may not be accurate and if you haven’t read the primary source (which is often the problem), you don’t know. There is no doubt that this is a problem with a broader variety of sources but the efforts to legitimize Wikipedia as better than an encyclopedia wreaks havoc. This is not because i want students using the encyclopedia - they’re far more likely to read the 10 page essay than hike up the hill to the library to find an encyclopedia that may or may not give them a clue about what’s going on. Encyclopedia citations are rarely my problem but Wikipedia as Cliffnotes is. I want students to be critical thinkers, not just piece together the varying levels of supposed critical thought that they find on the web. And if the web is useful to them, it should be as an interlocutor for argument’s sake, not a source of authority.
In both of these cases, comparisons to other media can be made and the problems that manifest are not necessarily new. The problem that i’m having with the Wikipedia hype is the assumption that it is the panacea for it too has its problems and those problems must be acknowledged, addressed and situated. It certainly has great value, both as a tool for information and as a site of community. But there are limitations and i believe that the incessant hype is damaging to being able to situate it properly and to recognize its strengths and weaknesses.
Comments (10)
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1. Andrew Lih on March 6, 2005 8:32 PM writes...
Danah,
You bring up two good issues - authorship and usage. Wikipedians cannot control how the content is utilized by the readers. I've been an avid advocate of Wikipedia even in my classroom. I tell students to use it all the time. But I'm with you more than Clay on this - if they ever cite it in a paper as an authority on anything or fail to cite the primary work I told them I'd severely mark them down.
As for authorship, this is where a new paradigm meets the old. It actually isn't that important "who" the author is given a sufficient amount of time, number of authors and number of edits. You see this dynamic at play in open source software too - the quality of the code and periodic audits of a person's contributions give a good reflection of the person's merit. Stochastic sampling if you will. Given this, the more interesting question for me is where is that threshold? When does an article go from inaccurate and dominated by a few to well reviewed, credible and "NPOV"? I would also argue that "authorship" in Wikipedia space is known through the complete transparency of the system. This is showcased either on the "User:" page explicitly, or determined implicitly by the Wikipedia "User contributions" log.
And lastly, might you be referring to [[Jane Austen]]? :)
Permalink to Comment2. no one on March 6, 2005 9:37 PM writes...
What's wrong with you? Wikipedia admits its weaknesses. If you don't want to use it, then don't use it. If you want others not to use it, then take over the world and ban it. If you want it fixed, then pay for it. If you just want to spout off, well go on, but you're not doing anyone any good.
Permalink to Comment3. Julian Bond on March 7, 2005 2:50 AM writes...
"I want students to be critical thinkers, not just piece together the varying levels of supposed critical thought that they find on the web."
Now there's a challenge. Are you teaching Science, the History of Science or the Philosophy of Science. (I know, it's probably not science but bear with me) Because the answer will be different for each. And your problem is not exactly new. Just because the supposed critical thought is easier to get at doesn't change something students have been doing since colleges began. 90% of them will still plagiarise and cobble together previous work. It's just that now they'll get it via wikipedia whereas before they all got it from the same well thumbed book in the library.
Regarding authenticity, this might be solvable with a technical solution. Perhaps individuals could sign off on particular revisions in the history. However this leads us into onion skin problems of identity and reputation.
I think Wikipedia is developing a new concept in authenticity unlike those we are used to. And looking at it purely pragmatically, it appears to work at least as well as the authenticated documents we are used to. So apart from the death of the dinosaurs, what's the problem here?
Permalink to Comment4. avi on March 7, 2005 3:18 AM writes...
Students who already use Google, delve seemlessly into Wikipedia. You can win this battle doing either:
Permalink to Comment- Show your student what's wrong with Google (doesn't show the entire web)
- Move from fact gathering to conclusion making
5. z on March 7, 2005 4:14 AM writes...
Use the history. It's there. Every page has a history. Look on the tabs above each article. Go and try it.
Permalink to Comment6. James Day on March 7, 2005 6:09 AM writes...
I definitely agree about the use concerns you have expressed. No work is a substitute for critical thinking.
Do know that those of us involved with it (I'm one of the technical team members) who apply critical thinking to our own efforts are well aware of a wide variety of limitations. It'll take time to address them. Fortunately we have the time and plenty of capable people, many professionals, helping.
Much like Andrew Lih, I think that the process at Wikipedia may eventually result in a situation where works where all professionals in the field can't contribute and discuss the best way to present the information may eventually become seen as a less reliable and trustworthy work than one where that can happen. Simply, no individual, however capable, can really represent all knowledge in a field and find the best possible way to present it, while there is at least some reason to believe that the Wikipedia process might. Or might not, of course.
We'll see. At worst, we'll end up with a very useful resource.
Permalink to Comment7. Stephen Balbach on March 7, 2005 7:37 PM writes...
"I want to know that the Jane Austen scholar looked at the entry that a 14 year old wrote and thought it was perfect."
You are suffering from intellectual laziness. There is no "pefect" source. Everything you read should be with a critical eye. You should read from multiple sources. There is no single authoritative source on humanities subjects. This has nothing to do with Wikipedia.
Permalink to Comment8. zephoria on March 7, 2005 7:43 PM writes...
Stephen - i think you're misreading my statement. I very much want to look at the Austen entry with a critical eye. But i want to know that the Austen scholar decided not to add/delete anything but s/he looked at the entry and was pleased. Just as there is value in reading a news article to see what the Austen scholar was pissed at, there is value in reading what the Austen scholar is pleased with.
Permalink to Comment9. David Gerard on March 8, 2005 8:43 AM writes...
There's currently some interest in a 'blame' feature, such that you can spot who put a certain word or sentence in. Solutions like this exist for computer programming (CVS-blame), but technical considerations make it slightly more difficult for the MediaWiki engine. I expect someone will write it eventually.
You can see in the history when the Austen scholar last edited the article. If they left most of it alone, it might well be worth knowing that.
The fourteen-year-old thing ... it sometimes frightens me when I find out how young some very good Wikipedia editors actually are.
Permalink to Comment10. Andrew Lih on March 8, 2005 8:20 PM writes...
An interesting comment from Jimmy Wales, related to this conversation:
"I do not endorse the view, a view held as far as I know only by a very tiny minority, that Wikipedia is anti-elitist or anti-expert in any way. If anything, we are *extremely* elitist but anti-credentialist."
Relevant thread here: http://mail.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2005-March/020916.html
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