[Web4lib] Problems with Wikipedia

[Jim Campbell]

There's also the whole question of how you define accuracy and it's
interesting in that context to go back and look at the article that
triggered all this discussion, the one on Mother Teresa.  It's a long
article with a lot of links. If you go and compare it to the article on her
in the Britannica, the Britannica article is much shorter but actually does
just about as good a job of portraying her.  Wikipedia brings in a lot more
specific facts, so has more potential for errors than EB does.

The big difference in the two articles, though, is that Wikipedia has a
section describing some of the criticism of Mother Teresa.  If you read only
the EB article you would have no idea that such a thing existed.

So which article is the more accurate, the one that might have this or that
fact wrong or the one that omits any mention of controversy?

If you seriously think that a named author makes a difference, I invite you
to spend a few weeks reading the reviews of scholarly books in the Times
Literary Supplement. You will find the reviewers pointing out error upon
error, not just of interpretation but often of fact.  Having the information
printed in a book from a respectable publisher with a single name on the
title page is no guarantee of accuracy.  Think of all the wonderful
measurements and statistics eugenicists published to prove various sorts of
human inequality.

And journals are no better. Again, think of the various cases of fraud
perpetrated recently in major, peer-reviewed journals.

It's good to tell students how Wikipedia works and warn them of the specific
kinds of problems it may present, but in fact  students need to learn a
critical attitude to ALL information.

- Jim Campbell
Campbell at Virginia.edu