Wikipedia gets a bad rap
Saif Ansari- Daily Bruin, UCLA
Issue date: 11/17/08 Section: Opinion
According to a 2005 study in the journal "Nature," Wikipedia science articles were determined to be "about as accurate" as those in Encyclopedia Britannica.
Wikipedia isn't perfect, though, and at any time information in an article may or may not be completely correct. The real issue is that critics who attack Wikipedia curiously seem to indicate that because of its flaws, Wikipedia cannot be used as a serious research tool. Furthermore, some think that if Wikipedia's major problems were fixed, it would become an authoritative academic resource.
But the first claim disregards the fact that Wikipedia can still be widely used for research purposes despite its inherent problems.
By compiling current scholarship on formal and informal topics from proton decay (which has not yet been experimentally verified) to the approximate net worth of the Gundam franchise (50 billion yen), Wikipedia supplies knowledge on subjects at rates and quantities that no other encyclopedia or academic journal can possibly match.
In other words, Wikipedia provides information for which there is no traditional alternative. While general knowledge regarding proton decay can be found just about anywhere, it's much more difficult to find authentic information about more peculiar and less scholarly topics like, say, Japanese giant robot TV shows.
It should also be understood that a fact on Wikipedia is true insofar as the source associated with that fact is true. In other words, you shouldn't believe a fact is true just because it's on Wikipedia; you should believe it's true because it's linked to a source that you can trust. Hence, facts can be verified by following the notes and references at the bottom of every article to sources that are commonly held to be authentic. While entries in other encyclopedias such as Britannica are written by thousands of expert contributors, Wikipedia achieves the same level of authenticity by forwarding readers to expert sources instead.
Wikipedia isn't perfect, though, and at any time information in an article may or may not be completely correct. The real issue is that critics who attack Wikipedia curiously seem to indicate that because of its flaws, Wikipedia cannot be used as a serious research tool. Furthermore, some think that if Wikipedia's major problems were fixed, it would become an authoritative academic resource.
But the first claim disregards the fact that Wikipedia can still be widely used for research purposes despite its inherent problems.
By compiling current scholarship on formal and informal topics from proton decay (which has not yet been experimentally verified) to the approximate net worth of the Gundam franchise (50 billion yen), Wikipedia supplies knowledge on subjects at rates and quantities that no other encyclopedia or academic journal can possibly match.
In other words, Wikipedia provides information for which there is no traditional alternative. While general knowledge regarding proton decay can be found just about anywhere, it's much more difficult to find authentic information about more peculiar and less scholarly topics like, say, Japanese giant robot TV shows.
It should also be understood that a fact on Wikipedia is true insofar as the source associated with that fact is true. In other words, you shouldn't believe a fact is true just because it's on Wikipedia; you should believe it's true because it's linked to a source that you can trust. Hence, facts can be verified by following the notes and references at the bottom of every article to sources that are commonly held to be authentic. While entries in other encyclopedias such as Britannica are written by thousands of expert contributors, Wikipedia achieves the same level of authenticity by forwarding readers to expert sources instead.
Viewing Comments 1 - 3 of 3
Gregory Kohs
posted 11/17/08 @ 9:43 PM CST
Ansari says: "a 2007 PC Pro magazine study showed that errors inserted at random in a number of articles were corrected within minutes", suggesting that this is somehow an authoritative test of Wikipedia's accuracy. (Continued…)
Cedric
posted 11/18/08 @ 12:03 PM CST
One has to wonder if the author of this article is a Wikipedia editor, in that it is fairly typical of the sort of bilge that wiki-apologists put out to try to justify their continuing unpaid labor on Wikipedia. (Continued…)
Dave Tonga
posted 12/06/08 @ 3:29 PM CST
The term "open-source" refers to the source code of the MediaWiki tool that is used as a content management system by Wikipedia. There is nothing about MediaWiki that implies any kind of open-source editing policy except that MediaWiki allows the administrators to control who is permitted to edit pages. (Continued…)
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