Wikipedia And Creditable Knowledge
As an immigrant academic, with so many projects to do and time passing by fast, usually, I find myself searching the internet for background information on my reading assignments: Information that ranges from summaries, context, bibliographies, history, etc. I use Google as a tool to search for content about my school work. It helps me to understand and set a context for my academic readings. The quality of information I can gather from Google searching, which in a way or another always leads me to Wikipedia, is debated among academics and professors. There has been a lot of criticism about the credibility of the information added in Wikipedia. Because of this controversy and disapproval from my professors, I’ve tried my best to stay away from Wikipedia when it comes to academic reading assignments. However, I often find myself using Wikipedia to find out about non academic research for general knowledge. Wikipedia is a free and fast place to learn about everything without having to read a whole book: People can decide what they want to read or not. I can also participate as an “editor” adding information to its articles. Even with all this controversy around credibility, and quality content, I think that as long as I am critical of what I am reading, I will be able to judge and add what is creditable to my knowledge when it comes to everyday life. In this review, I am going to conduct experiments as an “editor”, learn about Wikipedia’s administration and rules, and draw a conclusion towards its credibility.
Learn more about using Wikipedia for academic research in this YouTube movie
Wikipedia As Writing Space and Writing Tool
Image found at: nostarch.com/wikipedia_big.htm
By entering the About Wikipedia icon in the Wikipedia website, there is a Wikipedia article called encyclopedia article which explains: “Wikipedia's 15 million articles (3.2 million in English) have been written collaboratively by volunteers around the world, and almost all of its articles can be edited by anyone with access to the site.” As a result, Wikipedia can be seen as an outcome of community volunteered work where people from everywhere, with any background work together writing and editing their output. In this same article, there is an information chart that is updated almost every day describing that Wikipedia is running Media Wiki version 1.16 alpha-wmf(r59859) which is a software that allows people to write articles collaborating with each other editing their articles regularly. This informational chart also shows that on March 8th Wikipedia has 3,215,939 articles and 19,637,284 pages in total. There have been 372,077,537 edits; there are 841,568 uploaded files, and 11,843,064 registered users including 1,720 administrators. Below the information chart, there is an “update” icon where the reader and/or collaborator can click and it instantly shows the updated information. This icon gives us updated information on how many edits there have been. A couple of seconds after I’ve read this information, I pressed the update button to find that there were 848 more edits made to Wikipedia, and 71 new registered users in the time that took to reload the page. The conclusion I draw from that is that Wikipedia is a writing space where a lot of its readers have active roles as participants helping to improve the information that is already there. As Bruns points out in the introdution of his book Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and Beyond From Production to Produsage, “the term 'production' is no longer accurate” to explain what Wikipedia is since the readers of Wikipedia are also engaged in the act of writing and “editing” their own “product” when they add their knowledge to the website. Because Wikipedia’s articles have been spreading in a fast pace since it has been created, it is one of the most visited websites, and it has been recognized, used, and created by communities. Therefore, Wikipedia is not only a writing space improved by participants, but it is also a writing tool where every reader is able to stop their reading at any time and edit any content of articles by erasing, adding, or modifying ideas that already exist in the article being read. It provides a built in text editor where you can edit the content of any article.
Wikipedia As A System
Image found at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Wikimedia-servers-2009-04-05.svg
As an experiment, I signed up to Wikipedia, and saw that there are policies about neutrality, guidelines for writing style, and social behavioral ethics in which an editor should follow to keep his or her article or statements from being deleted or modified. In Wikipedia: Simplified Rule Set, there is a statement that says “there is no official structuring policing the quality of articles” However, a vandalized article can be modified within hours since there are a lot of contributors all helping to improve the website. I’ve also noticed that I could also add any information to the Rule Set, which made me wonder about the organization of this community. As Wikipedia is considered a “continuous, endless process” How can volunteers make sure that everything is being edited according to the policies made by community? To what extent are these policies enforced?
So, I continued my experiment by editing the existing Wikipedia article on the book The Color Purple. I added some information to this website without including any reference. As a result, one hour and thirty-five minutes later, someone else had deleted my comment from the page. Therefore, I concluded that Wikipedia is a system that is taken seriously by its collaborators who are all forced to follow its policies in order to keep their articles as part of this online encyclopedia.
Image found at: richardkaufman.org/causality/
Even though everyone can collaborate to Wikipedia without having to identify themselves—being recognized only by their IP addresses-- the system within this writing space reinforces its policies with quick updates made by volunteers. Not only the active reader can collaborate by correcting, or adding information to the articles, but also the editors who have a screen name. The “administrators”—the most dedicated Wikipedia editors who are identified by a screen name—are chosen to keep order by protecting articles, blocking ID’s of vandals, and deleting the articles that are not considered good enough. There are also the “bureaucrats” who can choose the administrators, and the “developers” who can make changes to the Wiki software. These Wikipedia organizers all work voluntarily for the website.
Image found at: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/archive/0/0b/20080831012910!Wikipedia_World_Developer_Champion.png
I come to conclude that Wikipedia is a successful system in which people are able to acquire knowledge for free, and to add their outputs to this collection of knowledge that is always developing. The Wikipedia system is not only evolving our community with collaboration, it is preparing the world for a bigger change where people will have opportunity to learn faster and freely by controlling their own education, and actively participating--sometimes playing the role of instructors, sometimes playing the role of learners.
Hi Jana,
ReplyDeleteNice review about wikipedia. On rare occasions, I have come across some false information on the pages, but overall I think the site can be trusted. If the reader comes across something that may seem false, it is always possible to double check with anoter source (book, another website, etc.). I am somewhat dissapointed when I am told not to use wikipedia for an assignment, but that could possibly because not every body knows that there is all of that background work going on making sure posts are accurate. I don't know what you said about The Color Purple book, but there was obviously some reason as to why what you wrote was deleted. Who knows? Maybe one day views on wikipedia can change.
-Amanda
Hi Amanda, Thank you for your comment! :) The information I added into The Color Purple article was some comments into the symbols of the book. They were not creditable since I was trying to verify if they were going to take it out. I didn’t add any reference to it, and it wasn’t complete.
ReplyDeleteJana...this is really interesting stuff. I think Wikipedia is a huge internet success story. Your numbers to make that claim really tell the story. I thoroughly enjoyed the background tour. I love that your test was deleted. They must have amazing algorithms to keep it all sorted. As I commented before, Wikipedia has become far more stable over the years. It's an interesting testament to the Wikipedia volunteer's conviction.
ReplyDeleteBefore conducting my experiment regarding to Wikipedia’s credibility, I tried editing Wikipedia using “Wikipedia Sandbox”. This place is a space where you can familiarize with editing or creating new Wikipedia’s articles. By experimenting in the Sandbox, I understood how Wikipedia really works. This was when I concluded that Wikipedia is not only a space where people can write articles, but also a tool where they can edit any article they are reading by adding or erasing information, and saving. The tools used in Wikipedia are very simple and clear. People can even add tables, pyramids, and pictures to their articles. Also, after registering to Wikipedia, I created my own personal page called “user page”. Even though I saw that I could create additional pages to my user page (called user subpages), I did not, since I was just experimenting as a Wikipedia user. Editors do not have to edit their user pages if they don’t want to. So, after that I started experimenting by adding information to different articles. All of these made me realize that Wikipedia is more than a writing space and a writing tool. It is a community based writing space and tool. The credibility of Wikipedia was what most caught my attention. So, I did a lot of experiments adding wrong information to different websites, and also creating an article with my boyfriend.
ReplyDelete