[Web4lib] Problems with Wikipedia

[Jonathan Rochkind]

There are also a few interesting examples of 'non-named author' material 
that are still widely considered reputable/authoritative.  Articles in 
The Economist are one example that comes to mind--none have bylines.

So authority isn't always only about a known individual author, even in 
mainstream academic/professional communities. [Someone will say, ah, but 
it's because we trust The Economist and the collective process they use 
to assign and edit articles, rather than the individual person producing 
the article. True, of course. Compare and contrast with wikipedia?] I 
don't have any answer to the ultimate nature of 'authority', I think the 
issue of 'authority' is an ambiguous one that will only become more so 
in the current environment. Our best as 'information literacy educators' 
is probably, as others have been saying, to describe the strengths and 
weaknesses of different sources (and classes of sources), rather than 
decide on some ultimate ranking of which are 'best'. And more 
importantly, give our patrons the tools to evaluate sources on their own 
in terms of strengths and weaknesses.

Personally, I have found wikipedia to be increasingly valuable to my own 
personal inquiries (professional, academic, or recreational). I found 
this happening almost despite myself over the past year and a half or 
so. I had an initial disinclination to believe wikipedia could possibly 
be valuable, but I found myself using it more and more. Which isn't to 
say I believe everything I read there (I hope I don't believe anything I 
read anywhere), but it's been an increasingly indispensible tool to me 
as one source among the many I consult in my research behavior.

Jonathan

Jim Campbell wrote:
> 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
>
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>   

-- 
Jonathan Rochkind
Sr. Programmer/Analyst
The Sheridan Libraries
Johns Hopkins University
410.516.8886 
rochkind (at) jhu.edu