Wikipedia as a Source

[Babbler]

I think amiee once complained about how they got some details about Tom Petty wrong.

Wikipedia is a mixed bag. There are probably some areas that (e.g. politics, religion, philosophy,etc.) where I gather it can be quite biased and of poor quality, other areas could probably better (e.g. computing topics, pop culture).

 

[ParadigmShifter]

The mathematics is excellent. Then again, it's not very subjective

 

[Babbler]

The mathematics is excellent. Then again, it's not very subjective

Yeah. Here's one guy's analysis:

The type of articles that are most likely to fulfill Wikipedia's promise have three characteristics:

1. The truth is absolute, not subtle.
2. Everybody knows a little something about it, but few people know everything about it.
3. The subject is interesting enough to attract a steady stream of potential proofreaders.

For example, the question of which countries drive on which side of the road is binary -- either left or right -- and it's fixed by law, so you can't argue about it. With almost 200 countries in the world, no single contributor will have direct experience of every country's highways, but with the whole Internet tossing in, you're sure to find someone, somewhere, who knows the answer for each country. If you check the History and Discussion, you'll see that some myths have tried to sneak in, but there are enough editors to catch these.

Wikipedia's List of films that have been considered the worst ever also fits this profile. They have a strict definition of "worst ever" (either cited by reputable sources as the worst movie of the year, or been on a list of worst movies.), and the article has enough traffic to keep the list complete, current and clean.

MORE

I've realized that I should add a 4th item to my list of criteria for a potentially decent Wikipedia article: Knowledge of the subject should be discrete rather than cumulative. By that I mean each piece of information is unrelated to each other piece of information, instead of all the pieces of information building on each other.

For example, knowing that Springfield is a fictional city is not necessary to knowing that so is Ankh-Morpork. Knowing that cinnebar is a mineral is not necessary to also knowing that fluorite is. You can simply add what you know to those articles without reading up on the literature.

On the other hand, knowledge of the Kennedy Assasination is cumulative. If you read only one article on the subject, you might be completely convinced that the Freemasons did it, but as you read more articles, you'll see that this explanation is not without its flaws, and that other, more plausible suspects exist. For this reason, a person who has read only one article about who killed Kennedy (the Freemasons!) would not be a useful contributor to the articles about Freemasonry or Kennedy. Subjects that require cumulative knowledge don't benefit by having every passing reader jumping in.

 

[BuckyRea]

And then there are HUGE GLARING MISTAKES. Which are the painful ones.

I keep catching errors in text books on topics that I know really well (which mostly boils down to US politics in the 1780s and 1789s). I caught quite a few in Howard Zinn's People's History as well the AP textbook I'm forced to teach with.

It's usually nickel and dime stuff, like saying George Washington was the richest man in America (among many others, his next door neighbor George Mason owned more property than GW), or stating that New York's ratification of the Constitution was necessary because it was the largest state (Virginia was the largest state; New York was smaller than Connecticut in 1790), or saying Robert Morris wrote the Preamble to the Constitution (it was Gouverneur Morris).

Simple fact checking can be quite demanding, I know. But when published people miss the minutiae that I do know, it really makes me wonder what stuff they're blowing that I don't happen to know. Am I just supposed to trust them that there was a President Benjamin Harrison? For all I know, they just made up the guy cause they had to hit a deadline.

 

[uppi]

But that said, they aren't allowed to cite Wikipedia as a source in research papers. For all its advantages, Wikipedia can't be considered authoritative because it's not peer-reviewed to the standards accepted by academia. That doesn't mean it's wrong; just that it's not reviewed. The analyses that many articles feature are not up to academic rigor. Quack theories, like bogus "no lawyers/esquires" US Constitutional "Lost" amendment, get equal play where a good peer reviewed work would hardly waste anyone's time with it.

That it's not peer reviewed is a non-argument, especially for some high school project. Even in real scientific work you can and sometimes have to cite works that are not peer-reviewed.

And that it is by default more unreliable than any other random website, press release or even book is also quite weak. Sure, anybody can edit it, but anybody can also publish books or make press releases or put up some random website.
For every quack theory there is on Wikipedia, there are dozens of books out there spouting even more crap. For science stuff I would trust Wikipedia even more than the usual crappy science news in mainstream media.

The argument that you should use against Wikipedia is that a citation should be as close as possible to the original source. And Wikipedia is by policy never an original source (except for stuff about Wikipedia itself). And as most things have a citation on Wikipedia, there is already a more original source available which you could cite instead, so citing Wikipedia gives the impression, that you were to lazy to follow the links given there. That's why citing it is very bad style.

 

[aukrest]

Where I live, wikipedia stopped being a credible source in 4th grade. All the teachers here are in a frenzy about how terrible it is, claiming people just write dumb stuff. One teacher made a point to bring up edits on the KFC page about using mutant chickens?

Well duh! More people are likely to edit something like KFC than the Crimean War..

 

[Bill3000]

It also depends on what you're looking at. In general, the articles in the natural sciences and math are more reliable than one in the humanities, due to the subjective nature of the latter. I'd be far more willing to go to wiki for finding a formula or derivation for physics that I want on than trying to answer a historical question for myself.

This is besides the point that one should always cite primary sources in papers, of course.

 

[Theige]

I keep catching errors in text books on topics that I know really well (which mostly boils down to US politics in the 1780s and 1789s). I caught quite a few in Howard Zinn's People's History as well the AP textbook I'm forced to teach with.

It's usually nickel and dime stuff, like saying George Washington was the richest man in America (among many others, his next door neighbor George Mason owned more property than GW), or stating that New York's ratification of the Constitution was necessary because it was the largest state (Virginia was the largest state; New York was smaller than Connecticut in 1790), or saying Robert Morris wrote the Preamble to the Constitution (it was Gouverneur Morris).

Simple fact checking can be quite demanding, I know. But when published people miss the minutiae that I do know, it really makes me wonder what stuff they're blowing that I don't happen to know. Am I just supposed to trust them that there was a President Benjamin Harrison? For all I know, they just made up the guy cause they had to hit a deadline.

The 1790 US Census disagrees with you

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1790_United_States_Census

 

[Agent327]

Population isn´t quite the same as size, though...

 

[Dachs]

Connecticut loses more on a size comparison than it would on a population comparison.

 

[innonimatu]

But that said, they aren't allowed to cite Wikipedia as a source in research papers. For all its advantages, Wikipedia can't be considered authoritative because it's not peer-reviewed to the standards accepted by academia. That doesn't mean it's wrong; just that it's not reviewed. The analyses that many articles feature are not up to academic rigor.

They both are reviewed. The difference between the peer reviewing which Wikipedia gets an what professional journals get may not be as big as people assume. In both cases there's a clique which forms a "consensus" around each particular subject. We hope that the academic cliques are more rigorous that the ones in Wikipedia which may lack academic qualifications, but both can be very nasty towards dissenters and deliberately deceive readers just so that their pet opinions are not threatened.

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

Something I would not use as a source is the Conservapedia. When I first saw it I really thought it was a parody because it was so painful.

 

[bombshoo]

I have used wiki as a source for individual graphs and data images and gotten away with it. For anything beyond that, it's probably not worth it. Even what I did was likely a stretch, though it was a very minor point in the overall presentation I am referencing.

 

[Traitorfish]

Something I would not use as a source is the Conservapedia. When I first saw it I really thought it was a parody because it was so painful.

Apparently, a lot of it is- a lot of the editors are just trolls, and the guys in charge are too blinkered to realise it.

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

Apparently, a lot of it is- a lot of the editors are just trolls, and the guys in charge are too blinkered to realise it.

Thats funny. Maybe I should go to troll it. But Id probably do it wrong and get banned.

 

[classical_hero]

 

[Perfection]

1) look things up on wikipedia
2) click cite links on interesting or questionable remarks
3) read original articles

that's how I use wiki

That's the sucker way. Write your crap entirely based on wikipedia and your gut instincts. Then go to the links, and cite the good ones in your bibliography.

It might be an utterly baloney way of doing things, but damn is it fast and effective.

 

[Omni314]

People that don't want wiki as a source can easily be shut up by simply referencing what the wikipedia article references at the bottom of each page

 

[Atticus]

Besides n:thing what Mise said, I'd like to point out to Aimee, that there is no way to protect against errors, it's something you just have to deal with. It's obvious that magazines of different sorts can be very inaccurate, but so can books, even those which are held in some sort of esteem.

Also it's possible that peer reviewed articles are untruthful, and this isn't only philosophical nitpicking.

You just have to learn to live with the possibility of error and to balance the risk and the probability: If you're doing master's thesis, you can rely on secondary literature for most parts. If you're doing doctor's thesis, you must question even the authorities of the subject. If you're doing a high school essay, it doesn't matter that much, whether you got the subject's exact birth date right.

 

[BCLG100]

1) look things up on wikipedia
2) click cite links on interesting or questionable remarks
3) read original articles

that's how I use wiki

This again. Bear in mind though that wiki articles are generally only written by one person so the facts in them may be skewed more to one side.