Wikipedia - re-examining credibility Luke Noonan March 25, 2008 As I prepare to start yet another round of term papers. I am given, time and again, by various instructors the same warning. and remember you can’t use wikipedia as any of your sources. I along with many of my peers have found various ways around this prohibition. Mine being to use wikipedia as one of my main sources and then to look around and find other sources to back up everything I write. This process is often helped by the fact that a lot of wikipedia articles include citations. Following those citations usually leads quickly to credible sources. This process works for shorter assignments that preclude one from going into much depth on a topic. Though as I progress in my academic career I am writing on topics that are much more obscure and require significantly more in the way of research. Basically I am finally being called to write above a tenth grade level. As I have begun to learn the ways of serious academic research I find myself more and more curious as to the relationship wikipedia has with the rest of the academic world. First for those who are not familiar with the wikipedia phenomenon, wikipedia is based on wiki software. This software allows anyone who can view a given web page to edit that page. Wikipedia is a project to build free encyclopedias in all languages of the world. Virtually anyone with Internet access is free to contribute, by contributing neutral, cited information. Many complaints of wikipedia are basically that there is no guarantee of factually accuracy. Any one can post or edit an article regardless of weather or not they know anything about the subject . Experts can post information but there is no mechanism to privilege their contribution over anyone else’s. Wikipedia.org offers up all its information for free and with no guarantees, eliminating most of its legal liabilities.

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Studies have been done to look at the factual accuracy of wikipedia versus traditional encyclopedias. In 2005 the British journal Nature assembled a group of experts in a variety of scientific fields and gave then a number of articles from both Wikipedia and Encyclopedia Britanica (on the same subjects). The experts were asked to do a peer review on the articles, checking for errors, but they were not told the origin of the articles. The study found that the 8 major errors found in the articles were spread evenly across both publications and while wikipedia had around 160 minor errors Encyclopedia Britanica had around 120. Showing that in terms of factual accuracy the articles in question were comparable. But the matter at hand here is not really factually accuracy. Its credibility. Perhaps we need some definitions. First a definition from en.wiktionary.org on 3/19/2008 @10:29 credibility [edit] Etymology From the French crdibilit credibility (uncountable) 1.reputation impacting one’s ability to be believed After weeks of blowing smoke, her credibility with me was next to nil. 2.(law) Whether or not a witness is being truthful. The primary measure of credibility is whether the testimony is probable or improbable when judged by common experience. Wictionary.org is another project run by the same people that brought us wikipedia.org as part of the Wikimedia foundation. The project is very similar to that of wikipedia except that wictionary aims for a dictionary type format instead of an encyclopedia format. This next one is from the American Heritage Dictionary via dictionary.com. credibility (kred’ ?-bil’i-te) Pronunciation Key n. 1.The quality, capability, or power to elicit belief: ”America’s credibility must not be squandered, especially by its leaders” (Henry A. Kissinger). 2

2.A capacity for belief: a story that strained our credibility. The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition Copyright 2006 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved. From these definitions It seems that credibility is a measure of how believable something is. One should note that the factual accuracy of a source is not a direct factor in its credibility. In reality a source can have no factual validity and still be credible so long as people are inclined to believe it. It is usually the case that a source that is factually accurate is considered credible. While many people complain about the factual accuracy of wikipedia.org they really seem to be complaining about accountability. Within the Wikipedia model it is possible to post and edit anonymously. This is in stark contrast to the print media model. In the print model there are gatekeepers that regulate the flow of information. An author or journalist who wants to be published in a non-fiction venue does research and then distills that gathered information into a book or article. From there one or more editors are given a chance to review the work and make changes with varying degrees of involvement from the original author. While the author might be an employee or freelancer of some sort, the editors are almost always employed by the publisher. The publisher being a newspaper or book publishing house or even a website. Since all of those people have to sign off on a given piece of work they are all (ideally) striving toward making sure the work is technically well written as well as factually correct. If the end result should fail to meet the appropriate standards the public can complain to the publishers and the publishers to the editors, to the authors. A failure by anyone in this process will reflect poorly on everyone involved. There is an established connection and fixed set of responsibilities within this model. The wikipedia model is not without some barriers to entry. If you want to contribute you must have a working internet connection and a web browser. It is helpful to speak the language in question (at least to read the menus) but ultimately not necessary. Since you are not hired by anyone that contractual layer of accountability is effectively removed. When you post or edit an article your username is attached if you are logged in or your IP address if you are not. So aside from you IP address(which is fairly mutable) the only data that gets collected on you is what you choose to put in your profile. Since your name doesn’t need to be attached to your work that layer of accountability is largely removed. You 3

also have no say as to who edits your work when they do it, or how many times. The wikipedia model has some advantages over the traditional print model. In the print model once the work is written and edited it gets printed and from that point on any errors it contains are in for good. They can’t be fixed until a new edition is produced. When an article is posted to wikipedia it is always open to editing. It is never permanently fixed, that includes bias and sabotage. So unlike Encyclopedia Britanica every error contained in wikipedia.org can be fixed. For a confessed information junkie like myself wikipedia.org has been a frequent stop to get my fix for some time now. It got so bad at one point last year I forced myself on a one week wikipedia fast. I went for an entire week without using wikipedia.org at all. It was honestly difficult but it forced me to expand my methods and rediscover the web. what I was struck by was how much longer research took. I was so used to having so much information so quickly that researching via a standard google search seemed to take forever. I had to look through a few pages before I got to useful information. (If not for google I don’t think I would have made it. I had not yet rediscovered libraries) While wikipedia.org was never the only place I got my information it was often the first place. People trade information all the time. There are different ways of going about it. Most of the time, if you were to meet someone and talk to them and they had lots information on lots of different subjects and what he or she said almost always proved to be true you would be inclined to believe them. In an academic setting things are a little different. If you are looking for information for your graduate thesis and someone offers you an explanation of some scientific phenomenon, while the information may be correct you can’t trust it unless that person has a number of degrees and certifications, and has published that explanation in a reputable scientific journal that gets reviewed by a group of accredited peers. That is the academic model at work. Wikipedia is not the library. It’s your really smart friend. While they may be a great place to start you can’t cite your friend in school papers (well usually). Wikipedia is and will continue to be an invaluable research tool across a huge number of topics but it will never replace the huge industry that is academic publishing.

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References [1] Derek Bailey. Improvisation. Da Capo Press, New York, 1993. [2] John Cage. An autobiographical statement. 1991. [3] David Cope. The Algorithmic Composer. A-R Editions, Madison, 2000. [4] Christoph Cox. Audio Culture. Continuum, London, 2004. [5] Lejaren A. Hiller. Experimental Music: Composition with an Electronic Computer. McGraw-Hill, 1959. [6] Robert Rowe. Machine Musicianship. MIT Press, Cambridge, 2001. [7] Heinrich Taube. Notes from the Metalevel: an Introduction to Computer Composition. Routledge, New York, 2004. [8] Roman Verostko. Algorithmic Art Composing the Score for Visual Art. 1999. [9] Rob Young. Undercurrents. Continuum, London, 2002.

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