Slashdot Log In
Wikipedia Breeds Unwitting Trust (Says IT Professor)
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Mon Apr 14, 2008 07:49 AM
from the unlike-slashdot-which-is-100%-reliable dept.
from the unlike-slashdot-which-is-100%-reliable dept.
kingston writes ""As I say to my students 'if you had to have brain surgery would you prefer someone who has been through medical school, trained and researched in the field, or the student next to you who has read Wikipedia'?"
So says Deakin University associate professor of information systems, Sharman Lichtenstein, who believes Wikipedia, where anyone can edit a page entry, is fostering a climate of blind trust among people seeking information.
Professor Lichtenstein says the reliance by students on Wikipedia for finding information, and acceptance of the practice by teachers and academics, was "crowding out" valuable knowledge and creating a generation unable to source "credible expert" views even if desired.
"People are unwittingly trusting the information they find on Wikipedia, yet experience has shown it can be wrong, incomplete, biased, or misleading," she said. "Parents and teachers think it is [okay], but it is a light-weight model of knowledge and people don't know about the underlying model of how it operates.""
Related Stories
Submission: Wikipedia breeds unwitting trust says IT professor by Anonymous Coward
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Full
Abbreviated
Hidden
Loading... please wait.
Wikipedia and research papers. (Score:5, Insightful)
As any first-year college student can tell you, an encyclopedia is not meant to be an authoritative source, nor can it be used a primary source in a properly-written research paper. It is meant to be a starting point for research only. If you quote anything from an encyclopedia in a research paper, then you need to cite two additional primary souces, which must by definition be from scholarly books, journals or other information published from scholarly sources, which very clearly back up that material.
Wikipedia's achilles heal for scholarly research isn't that anyone can edit it (a statement which, in and of itself, is not 100% complete or accurate and deliberately misrepresents what Wikipedia is and is not), it's that it is an encyclopedia and nothing more.
Re:Wikipedia and research papers. (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Wikipedia and research papers. (Score:5, Insightful)
That's what my teachers taught me in the "dark ages" when encyclopedias were printed on paper, and they should be teaching students the same thing today. Wikipedia or Britannica are great places to get a general understanding, and maybe a few sources, but that's it.
Parent
Re:Wikipedia and research papers. (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously, I see third year college students who still don't know what plagerism is. You can't convince me that they all know better than to use an encyclopedia as a primary source.
Parent
I see people on /. (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Wikipedia and research papers. (Score:4, Interesting)
Parent
Re:Wikipedia and research papers. (Score:5, Insightful)
Exactly, Wikipedia does not create bad research papers, bad researchers create bad research papers. It's time for professors to stop blaming Wikipedia for poor research papers and start blaming their poor teaching skills in teaching kids how to properly do research.
Parent
Re:Wikipedia and research papers. (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Wikipedia and research papers. (Score:4, Insightful)
I bet in another twenty years, I'll find more and more jobs saying, "underqualified" because I "only have a Bachelors" and they'll require more years.
Parent
Re:Wikipedia and research papers. (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Wikipedia and research papers. (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah but after they told me that, I was able to find my way out of the building (only ran into one dead end), so they brought me back in for an interview.
Parent
Re:Wikipedia and research papers. (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Wikipedia and research papers. (Score:4, Interesting)
Besides, High School teachers have become so retarded over the years it's amazing that graduates know anything. My College Writing I professor was constantly complaining about the lack of grammar taught in lower grades (all my teachers taught was 'literature').
Parent
Re:Wikipedia and research papers. (Score:5, Insightful)
Because, let's face it, college is supposed to be an advanced curriculum, and people attending are supposed to already have a High School diploma that indicates that they have met requirements to graduate that include things like writing a report. They don't need to be perfect, but they should know how.
Besides, High School teachers have become so retarded over the years it's amazing that graduates know anything.
This is the REAL problem. Why the heck should we spend 12 years in school if we don't learn anything useful? If anything, the spread of AP courses into high school doesn't indicate that students are learning stuff earlier, it indicates that standards have slipped. What used to be considered HS material is now college level stuff.
What used to require a HS diploma now requires an Associates, what used to require an Associates now requires a Bachelor. So on and so forth. We're costing ourselves a lot of resources to take another couple years to get people ready for the workplace - It's arguable who's better off, somebody who goes to work out of HS, or somebody to goes to college and comes out $60k in debt for a 'mere' $10k more a year in income while the guy who went to work has 4 extra years of income.
I think that we need to bring back the technical training - not everybody needs to go to college, nor is it beest for everyone. We still need mechanics, plumbers, and electricions. Hairdressers/barbers, cashiers and tellers. There are people who are happier in those jobs.
Parent
Re:Wikipedia and research papers. (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Amen to that (Score:5, Interesting)
A few years ago I had a student turn in a paper arguing that the drinking age should be lowered to 18. One of the claims the paper raised was that drinking ages are lower in many European countries, and that they have healthier drinking cultures. That's probably true, but the source that the student cited to back up the point was totally inadequate. It was a two paragraph account of German drinking habits. The account was based on an interview with an unnamed exchange student. It was written down by an anonymous high school student. And it was put up on the web as a really badly designed web page. Let's see - anonymous author, anonymous interview subject, obviously done as part of a high school assignment, very short, no details, and badly presented. Not exactly the world's most credible source. I made the student go find a more thorough account of European drinking habits written by an identifiable human being and vetted by some kind of editor.
That's a fairly typical example. However, I don't think it's anything worth getting upset about. Students have long been overly credulous. Heck, people in general are overly credulous. It's always been possible to go out, find crappy information, and blindly accept it. Wikipedia (and more broadly the Internet) just make that easier. Yes, there's a lot of GOOD info out there on the web, too, but finding it can be very difficult.
That being the case, I try to integrate assignments about how you do research, and what constitutes a good source, what Internet sources are good for, and when you might want to hit the library and dig a little deeper. It's really a necessity. The students don't know how to do research; therefore, we need to teach them. Many schools are beginning to recognize this -- over the last ten years or so the number of positions at academic libraries for "instructional librarians" has skyrocketed. They visit other teachers' classes and teach lessons on search techniques, evaluation of sources, give tours of the specialized databases the university subscribes to, and so on. Some schools are even beginning to offer complete courses on information literacy [uri.edu]. I think we'll probably see a good bit more of this over the next few years.
Parent
Re:Amen to that (Score:5, Insightful)
My high school put high priority on sources, some times up to 20% of total marks. Poor sourcing or incorrect sourcing was equated to the likes of cheating resulting in various repercussions of real world importance. Anyone daring to be as lazy as you example would fail that specific course. Though to balance this aspect researching methods was a small section of every semester in every class as well as critical thinking.
Yet when I got to university there was simply no emphasis on sourcing, we were shown Google and then yelled at about how Wikipedia was the devil and told to get busy. When I started handing in my sources like I would in highschool it didn't take long to realise that they rarely even looked at them, and _never_ checked the sources for themselves. Guess what happened next! I simply started Googling, sighting anything but Wikipedia, and grabbing random pages from text books that sounded remotely on topic.
The reality is students are lazy and the majority do the minimum to pass. Simply increasing the minimum standard and giving students the resources they need improves all the students who are just cruising through. Of course this is only if they have no alternative!
Parent
Re:Wikipedia and research papers. (Score:4, Interesting)
Parent
Re:Wikipedia and research papers. (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Wikipedia hightlights pre-existing human issues (Score:5, Insightful)
My first thought: s/Breeds/Highlights/
In general, I find most of the articles that complain about such-and-such a problem with Wikipedia stop too soon. It isn't that Wikipedia is often incorrect, or that Wikipedia articles lack verifiable sources, or that people are too quick to trust what's written in Wikipedia, or that Wikipedia is easily subverted by people with their own agenda. While those statements are all true, they're simply special cases of a far more insidious trend: People put too much trust in information.
Newspaper articles, scientific studies, engineering decisions, information in general suffers from all the same problems. How often do we see someone make a statement, claiming things are a certain way, but with no way to check on it? Just about every post on Slashdot, for starters.
Wikipedia simply highlights this problem.
Parent
Re:Wikipedia hightlights pre-existing human issues (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Wikipedia and research papers. (Score:5, Insightful)
As any first-year college student can tell you, an encyclopedia is not meant to be an authoritative source, nor can it be used a primary source in a properly-written research paper.
Why not? OK - I know what you are getting at, but there can be a lot more to a properly-written research paper than the actual research. If I need a few sentences on the history of someone or something, (background or related work), I'm not going to find it in a proper journal article, and there are a lot of people that don't have published biographies to look at. Also, I have seen peer-reviewed articles that are just wrong. One claimed that using the SUM of blocks was a good cryptographic checksum - they would be wrong. How that made it past the peer-review I'll never know.
I think the rule "no encyclopedias" is used as a fail-safe mechanism to prevent students from using an encyclopedia as their only reference, or over-using it as a reference. The real rule should be: Use your judgement on whether or not it is a good reference. However, there are a lot of students that don't have good judgement in this area and need the rule.
I could see the same rule being applied to posts in an Internet forum - "An Internet forum is not an authoritative source." OK - Then explain the KoreK attack on WEP. The attack was posted on the NetStumbler Forum [netstumbler.org]. Would the URL for that post be acceptable as a reference? In context of WEP attacks, it should be. Why? Because anyone other reference will eventually trace-back, through other references, to that post.
I agree that Wikipedia has a lot of articles with mistakes in them. There are also a lot of peer-reviewed papers with mistakes in them. We're human. It happens. I think there will be a lot of headaches from trying to define what a good reference is in the near future as more and more information is served-up through the web. Think about how you get your information on configuring Linux. Was it a journal paper or was it some guy who worked through the problem and posted results on their blog? If you are conducting experiments on performance, how do you know what settings to change, or what those settings do? You probably found it on some blog, website or forum and not in a traditional paper.
Parent
Re:Wikipedia and research papers. (Score:4, Insightful)
Do you trust the information you get about configuring Linux on the Internet automatically? What if somebody is playing games with the newbie? You don't trust the source until you, or someone else you trust, confirms what they're saying is accurate.
Parent
Yahoo answers is worse. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Yahoo answers is worse. (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Re:Yahoo answers is worse. (Score:5, Funny)
See, I use Yahoo Answers as a barometer for ignorance. I check it once every so often to see if the human race is still, collectively, an arse-scratching bunch of chimps.
So far, Yes.
Last week on yahoo answers:
Cud I B prgnent?
Did u do it standing up???
Parent
Re:Yahoo answers is worse. (Score:4, Funny)
Question:
"What is the meaningof "corrolary" in this sentence?
------------------
As a result, oil demand becomes less and less responsive to movements in international crude oil prices. The *corrolary* of this is that prices would fluctuate more than in the past in response to future short-term shifts in demand and supply."
Answer:
"Comparable to corollary in a heart, central blood vessel. Could say "heart of the matter" or point.
The (point) of this is that prices..."
Parent
Brain still required. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Brain still required. (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Trust Wikipedia? (Score:3, Funny)
Sharman Lichtenstein
Uh-huh. Sounds like someone's already defaced the article...
Everyone say it with me (Score:5, Insightful)
If you are using an encyclopedia for anything other than getting you started on your serious research, or satisfying a non-important curiosity, then you don't know what an encyclopedia is for. Apparently someone needs to tell this egghead.
Who is a "credible expert"? (Score:5, Interesting)
Honestly, I find that individual experts make far more mistakes that Wiki, which is to a good degree peer reviewed.
The errors in school textbooks are well known and discussed; many still in existance after decades. So shy of hitting peer-reviewed in-field journals or, of course, doing your own research: whom, exactly, isn't "light-weight" knowledge... or, more to the point, who can be trusted more.
At least Wiki lets you go into the history and see all the editors, everythign else they've edited, what the differing opinions were, and a discussion on the topic at hand. I can't do that with my encylopedia.
"Crowding Out?" (Score:5, Insightful)
From the start of this article (which was a bad analogy) to the mention of Google Knoll, I'm not impressed with this weird suggestion that Wikipedia is supposed to be the de facto source of knowledge for anyone and anything. It's great to start there or to 'get an understanding' as the article mentions but it's the sources and subsequent sources you find that have the real information. It's at least second hand information from the masses designed to be more second hand information for the masses. Not for doctors or academia.
I judged a state science fair recently and came upon a bridge project which hand one reference listed--Wikipedia. I asked the kid why he had only used these five different types of bridges and he said because that's what was listed on Wikipedia. I pretty much gave him a horrible score based on that and pointed out that the Army Corp of Engineers provides all its publications free and recommended he check that out if he wanted better information.
If you're a parent or a teacher, take the time to explain this to your children. If you're a medical doctor or expert in your field, stop fighting new technology that increases general knowledge and relax.
It would help... (Score:4, Insightful)
This is an idiot's analogy (Score:5, Insightful)
But, if I am to get a brain surgery, I will certainly go to wikipedia to have a basic understanding of what is going to happen to me. I'll also follow the links I get from there. And read whatever information I can get. It will make me capable of asking questions the next time I meet my doctor and certainly understand better what he will tell me.
I know some doctors prefer patients that do not ask questions. It just goes faster. But I think it is part of the doctor job to do what he can for the understanding of it's patient. They very very often do not. I think those doctors have a bad attitude, not their patients for asking questions.
More complicated (Score:4, Interesting)
However, with the advent of the internet, the same fads that would have come and gone in the real world, seem to have gained a staying power that is truly incredible to behold.
I think that part of the reason is that the Internet finally gave any individual the ability to distribute "media"... wherefore previously economic barriers would have prevented the dissemination of information by most independent individuals. With this barrier gone, any cook can make a claim, and as long as the claim is ridiculous enough to attract attention, it is also certain to attract a following.
For instance, how would one explain the "Autism/Vaccination" fiasco? Talking of blind trust, here we have literally hundreds of thousands of people, who willingly and knowingly ignore multiple large-scale peer-reviewed studies, only to put their faith into something that can only be described as an internet fad, started by some really sad an unfortunate parents, looking to place the blame for the tragic condition that befell their child.
The question is - what is there to be done about this. To be honest, I think that the situation can go both ways. We could slowly mature in our understanding of how the Internet works, and accept it as a public forum, with all the positive and negative implications that come with such a place. Or we could continue down into the rabbit hole of collective ignorance, into a future that I, for one, would not want to experience... a future where truth is no longer a function of fact, but a function of how many supporters an idea has.
The Professor Lacks Understanding (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The Professor Lacks Understanding (Score:5, Insightful)
What this professor needs to do is toddle off down to the history department, and politely ask a professor there if it would be possible to get his students (and possibly himself) an intro into proper source handling. These are not new skills - they've been the bedrock of a historian's trade for a century or so. They just happen to have become skills which are absolutely essential to everyone in the internet age.
In short; bad teacher, not bad Wikipedia.
Parent
Whatever (Score:5, Insightful)
How is Wikipedia the cause of this problem? It seems like Wikipedia might be part of the solution. Unlike most of the unsourced data you find on the World Wide Web, Wikipedia actually has a framework that encourages citing references and sources.
Not alone (Score:4, Insightful)
As opposed to what: Newspapers? Schools' history books? It's a bit silly to criticize only Wikipedia and none of the other sources accepted by schoolteachers.
I encourage it. (Score:5, Interesting)
Strawman (Score:5, Insightful)
(Many surgeons train for 3 or 4 years AFTER they become a doctor before they get to be considered proper surgeons by their peers)
Professor Lichtenstein (or Lichy to her friends?) assumes that all of us blindly trust wikipedia. I don't. I don't know anybody who hasn't doubted the truth of a wikipedia article. She already knows the solution - don't let students cite wikipedia, so its hard to see what her problem is?
Is she mad that people are contributing their knowledge for free, while she expects to be paid? What a terrible blow Wikipedia has inflicted on our poor starving experts.
Confusion: Research is not Citation (Score:5, Informative)
You can research a subject by entering it into Google, but you wouldn't cite the Google results page in a paper. Instead, you read what the results say, find out where they got their information from, and trace the facts back to an authority you can safely cite.
With Wikipedia, these authorities and the facts are handily edited, summarized and cited neatly at the end, but it works the same way as the Google search.
I think I can see the origin of this confusion. When I was in high school, the teachers were paranoid about us plagiarizing stuff from somewhere, and therefore were leaning on us to mention every book we'd so much as seen the cover of during research. This was because the books were all primary sources.
Once you research on the web, you're dealing with secondary sources (or further than that), and these should *not* be cited as they are not authoritative on their own.
It's the dismal tide, I tell ya. (Score:3, Interesting)
Wikipedia (or at the very least, open, collaborative knowledge) is not going away. It's stupid to keep complaining about how kids don't know how to use it properly, let's start teaching them the proper way to use it.
Blind Trust? (Score:5, Insightful)
Funny, when it comes to Wikipedia, there's no end of people telling us how we can't trust what we read, and we need to be careful what we use it for, and check the sources. Even Wikipedia itself is honest about telling you that an article lacks sources, is biased or may not be reliable.
It's with every other source that people give their blind trust to - whether it's other encyclopedias, books, the media, or, evidently, University Professors.
If Wikipedia has made people be careful of what we read, that's a good thing. I only wish people would engage their brain more often, and use that sceptism with every other thing they read or hear.
Here's an idea... (Score:5, Interesting)
Wikipedia doesn't thrive because we don't care about standards of evaluation; Wikipedia thrives because curious, thirsty minds seek answers they can afford and are available. I can, with my cell phone, answer just about any question I have, and Wikipedia is the easiest way to go about it.
If there's a tremendous worry that Wikipedia is somehow destroying academic integrity, I'm going to need a free, web-based solution, that has the support of a developer community that cares enough to write a website that formats the whole kit-and-caboodle for my iPhone (or for your Treo, or Blackberry for that matter) that allows me to, at a few concise clicks, satisfy my thirst for knowledge. I'm sick of hearing all the griping about Wikipedia, because it's whole purpose is to fulfill the job we're allegedly paying all this money at institutions for: procurement of knowledge. And these hooligans are trying to give it away for free... preposterous. Sometimes I don't want to know the nuances of the issue, I'm just trying to find who the NBA's scoring leader was, or what, for purposes of the article I'm reading, *is* a Boson Particle.
I can't read a book every time I've got a question, I'd literally do nothing at that point. Hell, I barely have the time to use Wikipedia to answer my question. I've got a lot of questions but having a phone on me with Wikipedia access means more of my questions get answered. Until there's a substitute that these people (charging thousands upon thousands for their answers in the form of collegiate education) can provide that helps me with that problem (my insatiable curiosity) Wikipedia's a gamble I'm willing to take. If something sounds unreasonable, I'll try and verify it elsewhere, but it doesn't particularly matter, it wasn't too long ago that Professors and Academics were up in arms about any internet sources; who knows who and what I can trust on the web.
I just want my questions answered people.
I'm surprised at how many people defend Wikipedia (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm surprised at how many people here are defending Wikipedia. When I first discovered it, I thought it was a great project. Now, I think it's not-so-great.
The problem I see is not factual inaccuracies (they exist but are comparatively easy to correct), but lack of rigor and a tendency to transparently pass-through the authors' biases.
When I say "bias," I am not necessarily referring to political opinions or prejudices. Those are examples but not, even, the most common. A bias is simply something that inclines one to think a certain way without realizing why, and especially without taking the trouble to consider and refute contrary propositions. For instance, Wikipedia's proponents (defenders? apologists?) are fond of saying that Wikipedia's open model makes it less biased than, say, a copyrighted encyclopedia. That's a biased statement itself -- it fails to consider, for example, the possibility that authors may be more inclined to rigorous fact-checking when they're being paid for their efforts, or the possibility that some opinions may be just wrong in spite of having vocal proponents who insist on getting a free soapbox in the name of "balance".
Finally, a rebuttal to the defense that "it's just an encyclopedia." Would you consult an encyclopedia, any encyclopedia, where 50% of the articles were known to be utterly false? Would you tolerate a 25% error rate? The question I pose is, what error rate really is acceptable and does Wikipedia exceed that rate, or not? My experience is a sample size of about 20 articles and in that sample, the rate of error or omission is about 20%. For me, that's far too high -- but I admit that's a biased analysis. ;-)
I trust the masses over the corporations and govts (Score:4, Insightful)
We have people in the intelligence community whose job seems to be managing/editing wikipedia entries on the sly.
We have politicians changing their own pages and removing anything unflattering, regardless of truth.
We have allegations of using influence to possibly get Racheal Marsden's page altered which would be slightly unethical (but something I am sure she would gladly do).
But here's the thing - thoughout all of that it is transparent. We know about it. If Wikipedia were a corporation or other closed model - this same sort of stuff would go on and we wouldn't know about it - or even worse, things that could upset powerful politicians or corporations may not even make it in.
Wikipedia may not be perfect, but I think it is amazing and amazingly trustable - BECAUSE of the transparency, and BECAUSE anybody can participate. It's not like someone can go on there and change important facts without it being caught - and usually it is caught within less than a minute.
Wikipedia as a system is designed to cope with any and all of these issues, and I (personally) find it much more up-to-date, credible, and comprehensive than any other encyclopedic source.
Re:it can be wrong, incomplete, biased, or mislead (Score:4, Informative)
Wikipedians do exactly the same things. For all the talk of NPOV on every discussion page, it's little more than talk. Almost every music related page is essentially fan site, and spam too -- music is a commercial product, from an evil industry. For some bizarre reason people don't equate music promotion with spam. And there's music spam on most other pages too - e.g. "xyz" wrote a song about "Cyprus" or whatever.
And then there's the much noted cabals. Political pages, religion pages, controversial authors, you name it - there's groups working every hour of every day to ensure the facts are as they see them.
And then theres the Wikipedia admins... the real problem with the site. Some of them have been proven to be frauds, to have criminal convictions -- and yet they manipulate facts, they have their own little agendas, they block entire countries IP addresses, or the addresses of individuals they dislike (or who are protesting the nature of an article). "Vandalism" isn't necessary vandalism -- they've never actually defined that word. It's like "terrorism" is to a newspaper - a license to do what you like in the name of "truthiness". Would Galileo be a vandal, would Rosa Parks? Is Stephen Colbert?
What's non-notable and who has the right to decide, why even decide, what the problem if it's not very notable but not spam? This is just like the way news editors manipulate facts and decide who's flavor of the month.
And then there's Jimbo... good old Jimbo. His relationship with Wikiality, his "misunderstanding" of non-profit and commercial, and "expenses". And his much documented, and much flawed history. Not to mention his autocracy and views on Ayn Rand.
How is Jimbo different from Rupert Murdoch? I see very little difference. Well... other than Jimbo has so far managed to mislead people into thinking that Wikipedia is "open" and somehow "open source" -- when the reality is far, far from that.
Parent
Re:it can be wrong, incomplete, biased, or mislead (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent