Wikipedia Breeds Unwitting Trust (Says IT Professor)

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.""

Confusion: Research is not Citation

[Arancaytar]

*Someone* (either those who are against or those who are for Wikipedia here, or both) does not understand the difference between research and citation. Wikipedia is an excellent research tool, and the professors are wrong to say otherwise - but you cannot cite it as a source, and a student would be foolish to do so.

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.

Re:it can be wrong, incomplete, biased, or mislead

[owlnation]

Just like newspapers.

Absolutely! Wikiality is exactly like newspapers in many ways -- and this is its primary flaw, and the point of this article. Newspapers have a powerful lobby and an agenda behind every news story. One that subtly uses semiotics and wordplay to manipulate emotion and how facts are perceived.

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.

An appropriate quote...

[BAM0027]

...that I think we can all live by:

Trust, but verify. [wikipedia.org] [Wiki]

Re:Wikipedia and research papers.

[Ottair]

Wikipedia for all of it's flaws is not even remotely like you describe. In many ways it's healthier than the groupthink that passes for peer review in some of the so called "sciences".

Re:Wikipedia and research papers.

[srleffler]

This is not Wikipedia's policy, although perhaps it happens from time to time. Wikipedia's "neutral point of view" is actually a quite nuanced position. An article in proper NPOV attempts to present all sides of an issue with appropriate (not equal) weight. Minority views are presented as minority views. Views held by extremely small minorities are not presented at all, except in specialized articles dealing with the minority viewpoint. Well-written WP articles present more than a single point of view--they compare and contrast notable views.

Re:Wikipedia and research papers.

[DarkOx]

Exactly Encyclopedias are a place to get enough of a handle on a topic quickly so that you can approach your actually research in a directed and intelligent way. They should be thought of as a tool get "get the right search terms". They let you collect a quick list of names and dates related to a topic and help you point in some directions you may not have known about.

They are not source material. Wikipedia is as good as any for the above; perhaps better. Any tool is likely to fail if used improperly or for the wrong job. You would try and change a light bulb with vice-grips would you?

Re:Wikipedia and research papers.

[Metasquares]

It never was truly open - there was always a strict and sort of ill-defined hierarchy in place (in other words, There Is a Wikipedia Cabal). I endured it for a while, but ultimately, it became too much to deal with and I stopped actively contributing.